Living with Fear: India unsafe, say women

STATE OF FEAR: Survey quizzed 4,000 women across 160 locations in 20 states.

        

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Keywords: Sexual Harassment, Domestic Violence

New Delhi: You don't need a survey to find out that women feel insecure in this country. You just need to take a walk in the evening. You don't need numbers to see that domestic violence against women is widespread. You just need to look into their eyes, perhaps yours.

Yet this realisation is not enough to devise a strategy to combat this violence. You need to understand the anatomy of violence - where, how and why of violence against women - to begin to think about countering this violence.

This is what the latest round of the six-monthly Indian Express-CNN-IBN-CSDS State of the Nation Survey does. This round of the survey focuses entirely on the Indian women.

We interviewed about 4,000 women in 160 locations in rural and all shades of urban India across 20 states of the country in the second week of January and quizzed them about a wide range of questions, including many sensitive questions on the nature of violence against women.

The findings of the study corroborate and deepen the popular impressions about the high level of insecurity felt by women.

Nearly half the women interviewed, 44 per cent to be precise, said that they felt ‘mostly’ (17 per cent) or ‘sometimes’ (27 per cent) unsafe outside their home. The survey findings also confirm that the metropolitan areas (million plus cities) are most insecure places for the women.

Vulnerable groups

Women in small towns feel much less insecure than big cities or villages. The survey enables us to pinpoint some of the most vulnerable groups of women that require special policy attention:

• Young women below 25 years feel particularly unsafe in all kinds of localities. While women in village feel safer than metros, the young women in the rural areas are more vulnerable than their counterparts in urban areas.
• The poor women who live in the big cities turn out to be the most vulnerable group across all the locations and categories in this survey.
• Single working women feel much more insecure than the average.
• While there is no strong community pattern to the level of insecurity, young Muslim women feel particularly vulnerable.

The survey gives some insights into the basis of this sense of insecurity. It is not so much the screaming headlines about rape or murder but the everyday experience of routine violence that makes women insecure. In this respect again, metropolitan areas are the worst places for women.