Filing FIRs to getting convictions, legal process stacked against women: study

Of the 4 lakh cases studied, 9 per cent or 37,637 were registered by women.

The study by Nirvikar Jassal, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science(LSE), was published in the American Political Science Review in October.

The paper studied 4,18,190 FIRs, filed between January 2015 and November 2018 in Haryana, that ranged from theft to burglary to cases of violence against women.

The paper, a first-of-its-kind study on police processes and judicial outcomes, traced cases from the initial filing of the FIR to the final outcome in court and found that women were disadvantaged and discriminated against in every step of the process.

The study matched over 2.5 lakh FIRs with judicial records found on the e-courts website and found that women’s complaints are less likely to go from the police station to the judiciary, and when they do, there are fewer convictions — 5% for women and 17.9% for male complainants.

This gap in conviction for cases filed by men and women belies the perception that women often misuse protective legislation such as the Domestic Violence Act or rape laws, which have a reverse burden of proof.

Speaking to The Indian Express, Dr Jassal, the author of the paper, said, “There is a lot of discussion, including by justices, that these laws are misused. The paper that I present does not find much evidence of misuse, at least based on the cases that are officially registered.”

The study also analysed the text of FIRs and found that for complainants filed by men, the top penal provisions invoked relate to theft, rash, driving, burglary and public intoxication/bootlegging. For women, Section 498-A of the Indian Penal Code, which deals with cruelty by the husband or relatives of the husband, tops the list of offences.

The study also found that women complaining of violence (VAW cases) wait longer at the police station before an FIR can be registered. While this wait has been pegged at 7 hours for all complainants, for women complaining of violence, the wait is 9 hours.

The study also found that on an average, women take more time to register an FIR.

“The median days between crime and registration (registration duration) is 1, with a mean of 28. Women’s cases, and VAW, have a mean of 69 and 113, respectively,” the paper found.

Casual dismissal of complaints by women that they are filed in the “heat of the moment” is not uncommon, even in constitutional courts.

A 2010 case of the Supreme Court by Justices Dalveer Bhandari and KS Radhakrishnan had made sweeping observations that “it is a matter of common experience that most of these complaints (of assault and violence against women) are filed in the heat of the moment over trivial issues.”

Incidentally, this 2010 ruling was one of the four cases the SC cited in a 2017 case that issued “guidelines” for arrests in 498-A cases, saying that the “ misuse of the provision is judicially acknowledged.”

The 2017 ruling was subsequently reversed in 2018 by a larger bench.

Speaking of possible policy interventions, Jassal said that merely creating more mahila thanas or fast track courts may not solve the problem.

“My paper shows that women’s cases are not only disadvantaged, but women face adverse outcomes at the final stage, that is, when the judge is issuing a judgment… I show the results for cases that actually reached the final stage of verdict, that is, when the women already accessed the system and/or spent money/resources to reach that final stage of getting a judgment. So, based on the data, it does not appear that simply creating more police stations (or mahila thanas) or special women’s courts or even fast-track courts is the solution to mitigate these jarring disparities,” he said.