Best Practices among Responses to Domestic Violence in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh

Abstract

Violence against women has been recognized as one of the eleven critical areas of concern by the Indian government in its 1995 Country Report for the Fourth World Conference on Women at Beijing. This is a significant change from just over two decades ago when the 1975 landmark “Status of Women in India”
report did not even include violence as a chapter. Yet, few concrete estimates of the magnitude of violence in India exist. The number of cases of violence against women that are reported to the police under legal classifications of cruelty, torture, and dowry death, give just a small indication of the problem. Torture and cruelty by husband or in-laws constituted the major kind of crime amongst all reported forms of violence against women in 1995, accounting for 29 percent of all reported cases. Further, these reports had increased dramatically, from 21,106 in 1991 to 36,219 in 1995.