Women misusing domestic violence law? Data tells a different story

The unfortunate death by suicide of an engineer based in Bengaluru due to allegations of harassment by his estranged wife and her family has underscored several concerns about the functioning of the law and legal systems in India.However, instead of addressing the systemic issues that affect both the survivors and perpetrators of domestic violence, the narrative is steeped in deeply reductionist ‘men vs women’ debates and generalised tropes about how “women are misusing the law” and blaming women’s agency and empowerment for the dismantling of the institution of marriage.At the outset, we need to accept the fact that all laws have the potential to be ‘misused’ and no legal system is infallible. Similarly, the vast majority of crimes in India do not end with a conviction, and that does not mean they were all false/fake cases or that the person filing the complaint wanted to misuse the law.Several studies have established that there are structural reasons behind low conviction rates in India such as lack of quality legal aid, hostile witnesses, familial pressure — especially on women and children to withdraw the case — flawed police investigation, and so on.However, these reasons are not recorded by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), the national quantitative crime database upon which most proponents of misuse of laws rely. Further, NCRB data has several methodological errors that can be used to propagate the narrative of misuse, especially against women using domestic violence laws. medium nocaptionhttp://youtu.be/PRjUZESUtBM?si=1WVnBW20KaUkbG4oFor instance, according to NCRB data from six years (2017 to 2022), more women (25,197) than men (21,579) have died by suicide due to marriage-related issues. Moreover, 52.5% of all female suicide victims in India in 2022 were housewives. However, it is often claimed that more married men die by suicide because of false domestic violence cases.In fact, there is no category of suicide due to false domestic violence cases in the NCRB. The category of marriage-related issues includes non-settlement of marriage, extra-marital affairs, dowry-related issues, divorce, etc. And it is family problems (not related to marriage) that constitute the biggest cause of suicide for men in India, for the period of 2017 to 2022, forming 30.8% of total suicides by men as compared to marriage-related issues (3.4%).Similarly, more women, both married and unmarried, die at the hands of their intimate partners and family members. According to the UN report on femicides (2024), the home is the most dangerous place for women globally as 60% of women who were killed by men died at the hands of a partner or family member. In 2022, dowry constituted the sixth highest motive of murder in India, regardless of gender, according to NCRB data.According to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) 5, 31.9% of all married women (aged 18 to 49) report facing domestic violence (emotional, physical, or sexual) by their spouse. Data from NCRB shows that the number of cases filed under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) Section 498A and the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961, increased by 33.9% and 32.3% respectively, from 2017 to 2022. These figures are just the tip of the iceberg since domestic violence is grossly under-reported.As per NFHS-5, 80.1% of women who faced violence by their current husbands never even told anyone; only 11.3% of the women sought help from any source. Only 6.3% of the women who sought help for any kind of violence reached out to the police.In addition to the problem of unreliable data due to under-reporting, there is also the critical issue of the absence of easily available public data compilations on civil matters, such as the various petitions filed under the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, divorce, child custody cases, etc. medium nocaptionhttp://youtu.be/l5g6Gv9noTU?si=qvLBSDLZWlOP8aKfThe other contentious issue of the arrest of the husband and his family members too is mired in controversy. Data on anticipatory bail, which means that the bail is granted even before an arrest, is not provided in the NCRB, leading to widespread misinformation about women abusing the law to get their husbands arrested. NCRB only provides data under arrest, clubbing both anticipatory bail and regular bail cases.However, data collected from Bengaluru’s Halasuru police subdivision for a recent study* showed that anticipatory bail was granted in 72.5% of cases filed under domestic violence-related sections such as IPC 498A, 304B, 306, etc. Meaning, that most alleged perpetrators of domestic violence are not getting arrested in the first place.Similar claims of misuse have been levelled against the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, because of low conviction rates while the underlying structural issues for low convictions are never addressed.Various legislation for women and other marginalised groups are often easy targets of disinformation partially because of flawed and unsubstantial data and due to existing systemic issues, such as inordinate delays and corruption in the legal system. These problems affect both the survivors and alleged offenders of crime.But as the Bengaluru case has shown, often the highly publicised media trials erase all the nuances of complex social issues and reinforce sweeping generalisations about vulnerable groups, leading to destructive consequences.* Data quoted was collected for a 2024 research study on domestic violence and marital cruelty by the NGO Aweksha, Bengaluru, and is currently under publication.