The data in India is flawed, marked by both under- and over-reporting. The question is not whether India’s women are safe, but whether they are free
Very rarely does data become a political hot-button issue in India, dominating the shouty nightly news debates and the daily Twitter sniping. Earlier this month, it was about data on the status of women, following an international survey that found India to be the most dangerous country in the world for women.
As a data journalist who has investigated crime and gender, this should have pleased me. But the debate around the new survey has only proved that India is asking all the wrong questions about sexual crime, and still misunderstanding all the answers, six years after it had something of its own #MeToo moment.
Recently, the Thomson Reuters Foundation put out the results of its 2018 The World’s Most Dangerous Countries for Women survey. The Foundation said that it surveyed “548 experts focused on women’s issues including aid and development professionals, academics. and policymakers”. The questions centred on five key areas: Healthcare, economic resources and discrimination, customary practices, sexual violence and harassment, non-sexual violence and human trafficking. India, fourth most dangerous in 2011, was now the world’s most dangerous, it said.
Initial responses to the poll were along predictable political lines, with an Opposition leader sharing it on Twitter and a member of the ruling party accusing him of having “slandered a billion Indians”. But some analysts examined the data and concluded that by international comparison, India cannot be the world’s most dangerous.
In December 2012, a student was gang-raped in a Delhi bus and left to die, an act of such horrific brutality that it became a watershed moment for women’s rights. Young people flooded the streets in protest and the young woman was mourned in marches across the country when she died 13 days later. That December changed the conversation around the place of women in India. Public displays of misogyny and sexism have not abated but public disapproval of it is now far stronger. Discussions around women’s autonomy — to work, to love, in dress — rage on in living rooms, but politicians who equivocate about it are denounced swiftly. Support for victims remains contingent upon other allegiances — religious, for instance — but disgust over this is voiced loudly too.
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