Crimes against Dalit women constitute the biggest category of crimes against Dalits registered under the SC/ST Act
Mumbai: A dilution of the stringent provisions of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 is going to affect Dalit women far more than men.
Nearly a fifth of cases registered under the Atrocities Act are crimes against women. If one excludes the category “others” (which includes various miscellaneous crimes), crimes against SC/ST women constitute the biggest category of crimes against SC/STs, data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) shows. Crimes against SC women include such offences as rape, attempt to rape, kidnapping and abduction to force them to marry, insult to modesty and assault to outrage modesty.
The actual share of crimes against SC women is likely to be higher as gender-disaggregated data has not been made available for other categories of crimes. The official estimate thus provides a lower bound for the offences against Dalit women.
In Himachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Uttarakhand, crimes against SC women constituted the majority of crimes registered under the Atrocities Act in 2016.
In five other states—Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Haryana, and Kerala—crimes against SC women constituted over a third of cases registered under the Act.
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