A Decade of Violence: Major Crimes Against Women in India, 2016–2026 - A Flashback
India has spent decades saying that women are goddesses.
The police records tell a considerably darker story.
Behind every spectacular case that reaches television screens are thousands of cases that never become national news: domestic cruelty, rape, stalking, kidnapping, dowry deaths, sexual abuse of children, trafficking, acid attacks, cyber harassment and murder.
This article is therefore not a catalogue of horror for its own sake.
It is a national memory test.
What happened?
What did India promise after each outrage?
And why did another woman eventually become the next headline?
First, the Scale
The famous cases are only the visible surface.
According to Government of India/NCRB figures, 338,954 crimes against women were registered in 2016. By 2022, that number had reached 445,256. The largest categories in 2022 included cruelty by husbands or relatives, kidnapping and abduction, assault on women, and rape. (Ministère de l’Intérieur)
Rape alone has remained persistent. Reuters, citing NCRB figures, reported that India recorded nearly 39,000 rape cases in 2016 and more than 31,000 in 2022. (Reuters)
These are reported cases, not an estimate of every crime actually committed.
And rape is only one category.
The decade also contains thousands of dowry deaths, acid attacks, forced or non-consensual miscarriages, trafficking offences, abductions, domestic abuse cases and increasingly cyber-enabled sexual crimes. (Ministère de l’Intérieur)
So remember this distinction:
A famous case is an event. Violence against women is a system.
2016 — The Decade Begins With Numbers That Should Have Been an Emergency
India registered 38,947 rape cases in 2016, alongside 64,507 cases of kidnapping or abduction of women, 84,746 cases of assault on women with intent to outrage modesty, 7,621 dowry deaths and 110,378 cases of cruelty by husbands or relatives. (Ministère de l’Intérieur)
There were also 160 recorded acid attacks and 46 attempted acid attacks. (Ministère de l’Intérieur)
That means the story of 2016 cannot reasonably be reduced to one celebrated criminal case.
The statistics themselves were the story.
India had already experienced the enormous public reckoning produced by the 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder.
The question by 2016 was no longer:
Does India know it has a problem?
India knew.
The question was whether knowledge was being converted into prevention.
2017 — Unnao: When Power Entered the Crime Scene
The Unnao case became one of the defining examples of the additional vulnerability that can arise when an accused person possesses political power.
A minor accused Uttar Pradesh MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar of rape.
The case subsequently developed into a sprawling controversy involving the victim’s family and allegations of intimidation. In 2019, a Delhi court convicted Sengar of raping the minor and sentenced him to imprisonment for the remainder of his natural life. (The Indian Express)
The significance of Unnao extended beyond one rape prosecution.
It raised an uncomfortable institutional question:
What happens when the person a woman accuses is considerably more powerful than she is?
Justice requires more than a criminal statute.
It requires the complainant to survive the journey through the system.
2018 — Kathua: When an Eight-Year-Old Became a National Fault Line
An eight-year-old girl belonging to the nomadic Bakarwal community disappeared in Kathua district in January 2018.
Her body was subsequently discovered.
The post-mortem confirmed rape and murder. Six people were eventually convicted in connection with the case. (The Tribune)
The horror did not end with the crime.
Public demonstrations were held supporting an accused, and politicians became embroiled in the controversy surrounding those demonstrations. (The Indian Express)
Kathua exposed several overlapping vulnerabilities:
child + girl + minority community + social marginalisation + sexual violence.
It also demonstrated something particularly disturbing.
A sexual crime can become communalised or politicised until society begins debating the identities surrounding the victim instead of concentrating on what happened to the child.
There should have been only one side in Kathua:
the side of an eight-year-old girl.
2018 — The Muzaffarpur Shelter-Home Scandal
Another category of vulnerability became impossible to ignore: girls supposedly living under institutional protection.
The Muzaffarpur shelter-home scandal involved allegations of systematic sexual abuse of girls residing in a state-supported shelter in Bihar.
It represented a particularly serious form of institutional failure.
A shelter exists because its residents are already vulnerable.
When the institution intended to protect vulnerable girls instead becomes a location of exploitation, the safety net itself has failed.
2019 — Hyderabad Veterinary Doctor Rape and Murder
In November 2019, the rape and murder of a 27-year-old veterinary doctor near Hyderabad generated nationwide outrage.
Four suspects were subsequently killed by police while in custody during a reconstruction of the crime; police said the men attempted to seize weapons and escape. (Reuters)
The case consequently produced two separate debates.
The first concerned the continuing danger faced by women.
The second concerned whether public fury over horrific crimes should ever substitute extrajudicial killing for a trial.
A functioning justice system must be capable of doing two things simultaneously:
protecting women fiercely and protecting due process fiercely.
Otherwise rage replaces justice.
2020 — Hathras
A 19-year-old Dalit woman in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh, was assaulted in September 2020 and later died.
The CBI subsequently charged four men with gang rape and murder. But the eventual trial outcome was more complicated than the original public description of the case: in 2023, a court acquitted three defendants and convicted one man of culpable homicide not amounting to murder and offences under the SC/ST Act; the court did not convict the defendants of rape. (The Indian Express)
The controversy was magnified by what happened after her death.
Her body was cremated during the night by authorities, generating allegations from her family that the cremation occurred against their wishes; police disputed that account. (NDTV)
Hathras therefore became about more than the original assault.
It raised questions about caste, policing, dignity after death, evidence, institutional credibility and the treatment of victims’ families.
2021 — The Crimes That Rarely Become Historical Landmarks
This is where retrospectives themselves can become misleading.
We remember crimes with names.
We forget crimes represented only by numbers.
In 2021, India registered 428,278 crimes against women.
That included thousands upon thousands of women whose names most Indians will never know. (Ministère de l’Intérieur)
Domestic cruelty does not necessarily generate candlelight marches.
A dowry death in a small town may receive two paragraphs in a newspaper.
A woman stalked every evening may never report it.
A teenager abused by someone she knows may remain silent.
A wife experiencing sexual coercion inside her home may not even describe what happened to her as a crime.
National memory has a celebrity bias.
Justice cannot.
2022 — Shraddha Walkar and Intimate-Partner Violence
The killing of Shraddha Walkar became one of India’s most intensely reported murder cases.
The extraordinary attention given to the alleged circumstances of her killing sometimes obscured the broader issue represented by the case:
violence inside intimate relationships.
The most dangerous person in a woman’s life is not necessarily a stranger hiding in an alley.
Violence can emerge from a husband, boyfriend, former partner or family member.
NCRB’s numbers reinforce the scale of this problem.
In 2022, the single largest category of recorded crimes against women was cruelty by husband or his relatives: 140,019 cases, representing 31.4% of crimes against women recorded that year. (Ministère de l’Intérieur)
The home therefore belongs at the centre of any serious discussion of women’s safety.
2022 — Ankita Bhandari
The killing of 19-year-old Ankita Bhandari in Uttarakhand produced another national controversy.
The case became intertwined with allegations surrounding workplace exploitation, power and demands placed upon a young female employee.
Whatever slogans India adopts about women’s empowerment become meaningless if a young woman cannot safely refuse what an employer, customer, politician, relative or powerful man demands from her.
Economic independence requires physical independence.
The right to work must contain the right to say no.
2023 — Manipur: Women’s Bodies in Communal and Ethnic Conflict
Then came Manipur.
A video showing two women being paraded naked amid the state’s ethnic violence caused nationwide outrage after appearing online.
But the video was not the whole story.
Reports of other serious sexual violence emerged from the conflict, and India’s Supreme Court moved to monitor investigations involving sexual violence in the state. (YouTube)
Manipur exposed one of humanity’s oldest atrocities:
using women’s bodies as territory upon which communities fight one another.
When ethnic, religious, caste or political conflict erupts, women can become targets not merely as individuals but as symbolic representatives of the opposing community.
That transforms sexual violence into an instrument of collective humiliation.
Civilisation should have left this behaviour centuries behind.
It has not.
2023 — IIT-BHU and the Question of Campus Safety
The alleged gang rape of an IIT-BHU student in Varanasi brought attention back to university campuses.
Campuses are supposed to represent education, independence and intellectual freedom.
For millions of Indian women, university is also the first opportunity to live independently.
Their safety cannot be achieved by restricting that independence.
The answer to sexual violence on campuses cannot be:
women should go out less.
It must be:
women should be able to go anywhere men can go without being attacked.
2024 — RG Kar: A Doctor Was Not Safe Inside Her Hospital
On 9 August 2024, a postgraduate doctor was raped and murdered at Kolkata’s state-run RG Kar Medical College and Hospital.
The killing triggered enormous protests by doctors and citizens across India.
In January 2025, police volunteer Sanjay Roy was convicted of her rape and murder and subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment. (Reuters)
The case struck a particularly painful nerve.
This was not a deserted highway.
Not an isolated field.
Not a stranger walking home alone at midnight.
It was a doctor inside the hospital where she worked.
Doctors subsequently protested for improved workplace security.
The case destroyed another comforting myth:
that women can guarantee their safety simply by choosing respectable professions, respectable workplaces or supposedly secure environments.
2025 — One Conviction Did Not End the Problem
The RG Kar judgment arrived in 2025.
But India’s violence-against-women crisis did not end with that conviction.
This is the recurring structure of the decade:
Crime → outrage → protest → political promises → prosecution → public attention moves elsewhere → another crime.
That cycle is precisely what must be broken.
The objective cannot merely be faster punishment after violence.
The objective must also be fewer victims.
2026 — Baruipur: And the Cycle Continued
In July 2026, the rape and killing of an 11-year-old girl in Baruipur, West Bengal, again generated outrage.
Reuters reported that India recorded 29,536 rape cases in 2024, while POCSO cases involving sexual offences against children had reached 69,191. The same report described other recent cases involving young girls in Rajasthan and Ghaziabad. (Reuters)
A decade after the 38,947 rape cases recorded in 2016, India was therefore still confronting tens of thousands of reported rapes annually. (Ministère de l’Intérieur)
That is the most disturbing part of this flashback.
Not that India experienced one horrific decade.
But that horrific crimes became familiar enough to acquire a predictable national script.
The Crimes Behind the Headlines
Look beyond individual cases and the architecture becomes clearer.
Over the past decade, violence against Indian women and girls has repeatedly appeared as:
Rape and gang rape. Child sexual abuse. Domestic violence. Intimate-partner violence. Dowry deaths. Murder following sexual assault. Kidnapping and abduction. Acid attacks. Stalking. Sexual harassment. Workplace harassment. Trafficking and sexual exploitation. Forced or non-consensual miscarriage. Cyberstalking. Non-consensual intimate imagery. Online sexual harassment. Caste-based sexual violence. Communal and conflict-related sexual violence. Institutional sexual abuse. Abuse inside shelters and custodial environments. Violence following rejection of romantic or sexual advances.
And underneath several of them lies the same principle:
a refusal to recognise a woman’s sovereignty over herself.
Her body.
Her sexuality.
Her relationships.
Her labour.
Her movement.
Her digital identity.
Her money.
Her decision to marry.
Her decision not to marry.
Her decision to leave.
Her decision to say no.
Stop Asking Women to Engineer Their Lives Around Predators
Don’t go outside late.
Don’t travel alone.
Don’t wear that.
Don’t drink.
Don’t trust strangers.
Don’t use dating apps.
Don’t live alone.
Don’t take that job.
Don’t reject him aggressively.
Don’t reject him politely either.
Share your location.
Call when you arrive.
Carry pepper spray.
Watch the cab route.
Check the licence plate.
Pretend you’re speaking to your father.
Indian women have been performing elaborate personal security protocols for generations.
There is value in sensible precautions.
But there is something profoundly wrong when society responds to male violence primarily by giving women a longer operating manual.
Freedom cannot mean being permitted to exist provided you execute the correct safety procedure.
And Stop Treating Rape as the Entire Women’s-Safety Debate
India’s obsession with spectacular rape cases can inadvertently hide the ordinary violence surrounding women.
A woman being beaten by her husband every week is a women’s-safety issue.
A bride being tortured over dowry is a women’s-safety issue.
A boss threatening an employee for refusing sexual advances is a women’s-safety issue.
A stalker sending hundreds of messages is a women’s-safety issue.
A former boyfriend threatening to publish intimate photographs is a women’s-safety issue.
A trafficked girl is a women’s-safety issue.
A woman unable to safely leave her relationship is a women’s-safety issue.
And a girl whose family removes her from school because the journey is unsafe is experiencing the economic consequences of women’s insecurity before she has even entered the labour market.
India’s Real Women’s-Safety Test
The ultimate measurement should not be how severely India punishes the perpetrator in the year’s most famous case.
Ask instead:
Can a woman walk home?
Can she take a night shift?
Can she reject a man?
Can she leave her husband?
Can she report her boss?
Can she travel alone?
Can she attend university?
Can she use public transport?
Can she participate in politics?
Can she go to the police without humiliation?
Can a Dalit woman expect equal protection?
Can a tribal woman?
Can a poor woman?
Can a sex worker?
Can a woman with disabilities?
Can an eleven-year-old child attend a birthday party and return home?
Can a doctor rest safely inside her own hospital?
If the answer depends on who the woman is, where she lives, whom she knows, what caste she belongs to, how wealthy her family is, or whether her attacker has power—
equality before law remains incomplete.
What Ten Years Should Teach India
India does not suffer from a shortage of outrage.
It suffers from the short half-life of outrage.
The country needs boring, permanent machinery:
better-trained police; functioning forensic systems; rapid evidence preservation; witness and survivor protection; accountable investigation; sufficiently staffed courts; specialised prosecution; safe public transport; workplace safeguards; functioning shelters; responsible sex and consent education; interventions against domestic abuse; cybercrime capabilities; child-protection systems; and measurable accountability when institutions fail.
Punishment matters.
But prevention is the higher achievement.
The safest country is not the country that hangs the greatest number of rapists.
It is the country that produces the fewest victims.
A Memorial Without Names
There is one final problem with writing a list like this.
Kathua.
Unnao.
Hathras.
Hyderabad.
Manipur.
RG Kar.
These names survive because the cases became famous.
But somewhere between 338,954 recorded crimes against women in 2016 and 445,256 in 2022 are enormous numbers of women whose stories never became hashtags. (Ministère de l’Intérieur)
Some survived.
Some died.
Some obtained convictions.
Some watched cases collapse.
Some never complained.
Some were children.
Some were elderly.
Some were attacked by strangers.
Many knew the perpetrator.
History tends to remember exceptional crimes.
A justice system must remember ordinary victims.
The Flashback
2016 gave India nearly 39,000 recorded rapes.
2017 gave India Unnao.
2018 gave India Kathua and Muzaffarpur.
2019 gave India Hyderabad.
2020 gave India Hathras.
2021 gave India hundreds of thousands more recorded crimes without one single case adequately representing them.
2022 gave India Shraddha Walkar and Ankita Bhandari.
2023 gave India Manipur and IIT-BHU.
2024 gave India RG Kar.
2025 brought a conviction in RG Kar—and more cases.
2026 brought Baruipur and still more children and women into the statistics.
The names changed.
The question did not.
How many women have to become national news before women’s safety stops being news?
Mahakali Tribunal
Intelligence. Justice. Wealth.
A civilisation should not measure its respect for women by the goddesses it worships.
It should measure it by something much harder:
whether an ordinary woman can live an ordinary life without fear.
