This article is an updated version of one that first appeared in The Interpreter, published by the Lowy Institute. It’s republished with full permission. Read the original here.
Over the past month India has been in the headlines for another shocking act of sexual violence: the rape and murder of a trainee doctor in the Kolkata hospital in which she worked.
The incident – which set off ongoing industrial action and is this week in the courts – shone a light on the unsafe conditions that many women in the country labour under. If a doctor – with all the prestige and importance placed on the role – is vulnerable, what about the many million of others?
The last time there was this degree of public outrage over the rape and murder of a woman was in 2012, the infamous Delhi bus incident. At the time, authorities responded swiftly to mass protests with changes to the criminal justice system, including tougher sentences.
But according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau, the number of reported rapes has increased dramatically. In 2012 it was around 25,000 cases per year. Numbers peaked at nearly 39,000 in 2016. There were more than 31,000 reported cases in 2022, the most recent data available.
For a while, newspaper headlines referred to it as a “sexual violence pandemic”.
Concurrently, there has been another trend: the drop in female labour participation rates. In 2005, 32 percent of Indian women were in the workforce. In 2021, that rate had dropped to 19 percent.
The figure has corrected, post-pandemic, with 33 percent in the workforce as of 2023, which is a positive move. Still, India remains in the bottom 20 of the list of countries according to share of working women.
The figures refer to women over the age of 15 who are not in work, nor are looking for work. And of those who work, most are employed in menial textile-related jobs, domestic labour, or, in rural areas, agriculture. (But there is evidence that this profile is changing: women who are leaving the workforce come from the agricultural or unskilled sectors, while growth is in services.)
By comparison, China’s female labour force participation rate is at 61 percent (down from 72 percent in 1991), South Africa is 52 percent and Pakistan at 24 percent (up from 12.5 percent in 1995).
The precise reasons for India’s situation are varied. Despite economic progress in recent decades – and with it, social and cultural shifts – there are persistent retrograde attitudes about women’s roles being tied to domestic work. At the same time, women are likely to remain in higher education for longer, and there has traditionally been a lack of job growth in the sectors that women tend to work in.
But there is also a very strong likelihood that the threat of sexual violence is keeping women inside the home – whether by choice or at the behest of family members. A closely linked factor is that mothers are now preferring to stay at home rather than leave children in the care of domestic staff.
The doctor incident is not an isolated one. There are daily reports of violent rapes by teachers, by colleagues, fellow students, and even police. The only difference is that this one is making headlines.
It is important here to point out that – like everywhere else in the world – in the vast majority (i.e., more than 90%) of cases, the perpetrator is already known to the victim, and rates of sexual violence within the home are high, while marital rape is not criminalised. In 2016 the then minister for women and children said:
[T]he concept of marital rape, as understood internationally, cannot be suitably applied in the Indian context due to various factors like level of education or illiteracy, poverty, myriad social customs and values, religious beliefs, mindset of the society to treat the marriage as a sacrament, etc.
The worsening sexual violence rates are, in part, being attributed to women’s growing financial independence and changing social roles, particularly in the more conservative and patriarchal regions.
Why does it matter, in economic terms?
The link between sexual violence and the economy has been made repeatedly in recent years. In 2018, the McKinseyGlobal Institute estimated that India could boost its GDP by $770 billion in seven years by getting more women into the workforce. Even earlier, in 2013, the respected Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham) conducted a survey that found 82% of the 2,500 women surveyed said that since the 2012 bus attack, they had started working reduced hours out of fears of being out of the home after dark. In particular, it found that productivity in the Delhi IT sector had dropped by up to 40% since the attack.
More recently, research has found that India, in its quest to break through that 8 percent figure for GDP growth, needs to harness its female population to do this, and raise it to more than 43 percent by 2030. Right now, India’s economic growth is performing strongly after a few years of sluggish growth. The World Bank has recently raised its growth forecast for FY 24-25 to 7 percent – however fears of a recession stubbornly hover in the background. The Modi government wants to see a good news story in the form of magical economic figures, to burnish its global reputation as a major emerging power.
Back in 2012, the government’s response to the bus rape was to execute the perpetrators. It was a Band-Aid solution that divided the country. But clearly, it did little to staunch the persistently high rates of sexual violence. If the government is serious about women’s safety, it needs to address the underlying issues in the deeply patriarchal society and system.
I’m optimistic. After all, economic growth is a major motivator for a lot of activity. Why should women’s safety be any different?
- Picture at top: Protestors in R.G. Kar Hospital Rape and Murder protest march, 4 September 2024. Picture: Porshi Photographer, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Aarti Betigeri is a multi-platform journalist and former foreign correspondent based in Canberra. She is a correspondent for Monocle and contributes to various other local and foreign media outlets. She recently returned to Australia after almost a decade in India, where she reported across South Asia for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Time, the Christian Science Monitor, Public Radio International, and many others. She has interviewed three world leaders and worked on major investigative journalism initiatives including an ABC Foreign Correspondent documentary on international surrogacy. Prior to moving to India, she was a television news journalist and presenter with the ABC and SBS.
