When ‘Marginal’ Means Massive: The invisible weight of gendered violence in NCRB crime statistics 2023 Statistics describe order; gendered violence exists outside the neat cells of spreadsheets. This article reconnects data with lived reality
29, Oct 2025 | CJP Team
When the 2023 report of the NCRB was published, leading newspapers had clearly resolved the data to produce reassuring headlines: “Crimes against women rise marginally,” “Crime against children has increased by 9.2%.” In those qualifiers—marginally, only 9%—lies the quiet comfort of normalisation. Violence appeared to have neither worsened nor warranted concern. However, those “marginal” rises equate to tens of thousands more survivors. For women, children, and marginalized communities, these are not mere fluctuations in data; they signal the difference between survival and silence.
There is a story of unbroken violence behind the language of percentages. The NCRB might record a few percentage points of change year to year, but the factual curve of cruelty, fear, and impunity is steep and continuous. In projecting a neutral and comprehensive approach, the Bureau displays a sort of bureaucratic amnesia: it renders visible structural violence and the inaction of the State as statistical.
The Myth of ‘Marginal’ Improvement
According to NCRB 2023, India recorded 471,000 reports of crimes against women, a nominal increase of three percent from the previous year. The largest single category remains “cruelty by husband or relatives” under section 498-A of IPC, at over 31 percent of all crimes against women. Reported rapes amounted to 32,032, roughly the same as the reports in 2022; assault with intent to outrage modesty was recorded at about 20 percent. However, the situation is worse for children: POCSO (Prevention of Children from Sexual Offences) and associated crimes increased by 9.2% this year, exceeding 170,000 cases.
In June 2023, the Dewas district in Madhya Pradesh experienced a tragedy resulting from coercive harassment. A married woman, Reena Joshi, 26 years old, died after allegedly ingesting acid as the culmination of months of harassing behaviour by a local man, Zakir Hussain. The FIR her husband filed stated that Hussain had been harassing Reena, threatening her to end her marriage, to convert to Islam, and to marry him. The FIR also noted that despite the couple’s multiple complaints to the local police, no preventive measures were taken. On 10 June 2023, Reena died from her injuries, and at the time of her death, she directly named Zakir in her statements to those trying to save her life. Zakir was charged with and arrested under Sections 306 (abetment of suicide), 354D (stalking), and the Madhya Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act, 2021. The incident led to protests by women’s and community groups, calling for accountability from police for their inaction in the face of reported harassment. In aggregate, this was an episode that illustrated structural neglect, collapsing everyday harassment into fatal violence: the law can then only respond after someone dies, while the accused would not be charged with murder but instead abetment of suicide as recorded by the NCRB —both minimizing and removing the gendered and communal motivation behind the behaviour.
At first glance, these small percentage increases may seem to indicate stability or a sense that things haven’t really changed. Yet the small percentage increase masks the inability of gendered justice to make progressive change, improvement. Further, an increase of three percent represents over 14,000 more women reporting violence against women. In India, however, we know that one in ten assault cases will be reported at the very least – on an already underreported crime according gf to the NFHS-5. Thus, NCRB appearances of reported cases are a fragment of a much larger, certainly unreported crisis and violation, and depend upon those individuals to sacrifice their dignity in an institutional and systemic sense. Statistically, the NCRB is relying on reported FIRs (first information reports), so that the illusion appears real.
The rationale suggests that if we don’t file a complaint, there is no problem. Mainstream coverage also advances the invisibility: by attributing the word “marginal” to the increase, the newsroom and media outlets unconsciously (or otherwise) participate in the state’s rhetoric of containment, as if gendered violence is merely a data problem, not a social emergency. What masquerades as stability is, in fact, indifference, which has both institutional and systemic impact.
Data without Identity: How Categories erase Vulnerability
If NCRB’s percentages flatten time, its categories flatten people. Crimes committed against women are presented as one large, lumped category that does not disaggregate for caste, religion, class, or disability, all of which structure vulnerability and allow access to justice, anywhere in the 2023 report. The only modest exception is “Crimes against Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe women,” and that is put into its own category, marking the pattern of intersectional violence as totally separate from the gendered whole.
This structural erasure substantiates what feminist scholars have termed the violence of difference itself: that a Dalit woman’s rape, an Adivasi girl’s trafficking, or a disabled woman’s assault do not happen on their own but at the intersection of several hierarchies. The Hathras case (2020) stands as an emblematic instance of this: a Dalit woman was raped, her story ignored and erased, her body burnt to the ground. However, NCRB’s data design ensures that no such trend can be evidenced statistically again.
Furthermore, the Bureau’s gender binary means that LGBT survivors are entirely erased from the data. Trans women, gender non-conforming people, and male survivors of sexual violence disappear from the Bureau’s reporting, making counts impossible. To only count individuals that conformed to gender is to reproduce the very harm again through “neutrality.” In the NCRB’s data-driven justice, invisibility signifies that count.
The West Bengal Case Study: Acid Violence and Everyday Cruelty
Few forms of gendered violence are as literal or as haunting as acid attacks. West Bengal is, not surprisingly, the epicentre of the violence. It accounted for nearly one-fifth of all reported acid attacks in India in 2023. The vast majority of victims are young women, punished for rejecting advances, defying control, or asserting self-determination.
Behind every NCRB statistic lies the face of a survivor, disfigured by both acid and inaction. Survivors describe experiences of being transported between hospitals without burn units, climbing a three-to-five-year waiting list for a hearing at court, or working with police officers who treat the investigation as a waste of time. A field report from 2023 conducted by the Hindu from North 24 Parganas documented that survivors have yet to receive the Rs 3 lakh mandated compensation prescribed under the Supreme Court, an entire decade after the attack. For more than half of the survivors, the only consistent part of their experience after the attack is falling into poverty.
Where acid attacks appear in NCRB 2023, they appear under a neutral, bureaucratic category entitled “grievous hurt.” The neutralised language, substituted in place of targeted misogynist violence, reduces it to bodily harm and ignores its symbolic and social identity. There is also no data about rehabilitation, conviction rates, or disbursal of compensation. Defining acid violence in an unqualified way allows the State to distance itself from characterizing this as a moral failure, under the medical lexicon.
In West Bengal, civil society organisations such as Acid Survivors Foundation India (ASFI) have consistently pointed out how police evade filing complaints under the relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code (326A, 326B) to suppress “rising crime rates,” and the National Crime Records Bureau then records this reduction in cases, rounding out this circle of denial. Each entry is then not progress toward justice, but rather a record of silence, reported the Indian Express.
On August 16, 2023, Jayanta Roy, a 35-year-old resident of Zamindar Para, a locality in Jalpaiguri town, threw acid on his neighbour, a 22-year-old woman, after she consistently turned down his romantic gestures. The woman, whose name family asked to be concealed, suffered deep burns to her face, chest, and shoulders. She was rushed to North Bengal Medical College, where doctors found she had incurred third-degree chemical injuries. Roy’s attack followed her, attracting weeks of trailing and loud harassment. The woman’s family reported that both times reported her was rebuffed by police, who told them to leave as it amounted to a “personal dispute.” Local outrage finally prompted local police to arrest Roy, superficially charging Roy under IPC Sections 326A (acid attack), 341 (wrongful restraint), and 354 (assault on a woman). The event was treated as a fast-track case, and the Jalpaiguri District and Sessions Court ultimately sentenced Roy in February 2024 to 15 years’ rigorous imprisonment with a fine of ₹3 lakh.
The case is noteworthy not only for the infrequent conviction but also for revealing the important procedural bias that ASFI has been publicly advocating for as long as two years — that is, most acid attacks are never afforded the appropriate legal formality and thus simply disappear from the NCRB records altogether. As The Hindu reported, West Bengal had 16 acid attacks in 2023, the highest in India, but local NGOs report the actual number is likely double that when misclassifications of burns and withdrawn FIRs are considered.
Structural Underreporting and the Politics of Marginality
The structure of India’s justice system guarantees that the majority of gendered violence never reaches official visibility. FIRs rely on police discretion; prosecution relies on political will; data on conviction relies on judicial efficiency; and all this relies on survivors’ emotional stamina. For poor and marginalized women, it is deadly.
Data from the 2023 NCRB indicates there are a little over 1.3 lakh rape cases and over 2 lakh domestic cruelty cases that are pending. The time taken to complete a trial averages at over 5 years. One-Stop Centres (OSCs) that are supposed to provide integrated support to survivors are woefully underfunded and are not well-served. In many states, there are fewer than a dozen functioning centres. The NCRB does not provide cross-references for these service inadequacies; all it does is count cases, not conditions.
In digital spaces, gendered violence is finding new forms. Offences of online stalking, non-consensual sharing of images, and blackmail comprise a substantial proportion of the complaints now received under the IT Act. But, as indicated by the data from RTI from Mumbai, only a fraction of these offences turn into FIRs. Cyber harassment, in particular of journalists and women activists, has simply become a normalized way of life, but these acts are often framed as ‘defamation’ or ‘obscenity’ and thus escape the NCRB’s gendered lens entirely.
This type of structural undercount is not by mistake; it is a performance of stability. By keeping official numbers deceptively low, the State can suggest that its policies from Beti Bachao Beti Padhao to dispersing Nirbhaya Fund are “working.” Meanwhile, the continuum of harm remains intact, only concealed under an administrative façade of calm.
The Absences of Intersectionality and Enumeration
The omissions by the NCRB in categories like mob lynching, honour killing, or hate crimes further impoverish our understanding of how gender inter-relates with other forms of violence. Most forms of violence against women in interfaith or inter-caste relationships, for example, then get recategorised under “murder” or “kidnapping.” The political decision to stop monitoring 2017 these forms of violence reflects a larger trend of erasure.
The same erasure occurs in more publicly visible anti-feminist violence against women, whether they are journalists, protestors, or organizers. The 2023 IFEI Press Freedom Report recorded 226 accounts of harassment, hindrance, and threats, including for women journalists covering communal or gender issues. When we looked at the NCRB categories of “Offences Against the State” and “Offences Affecting Public Tranquility,” there are essentially no entries.
It’s the same when thinking of women online. The cyber restrictions and internet shutdowns during the farmers’ protests, or in Manipur, severed women from online safety resources – an erasure that does not fall under any NCRB recognisability.
What cannot be charged is not counted, and what is not counted does not exist in the eyes of the State.
The Cost of the Systemic Erasure of Crime
The NCRB’s 2023 report, similar to its precedents, is not just a record of data — it is a story about denial. By calling violence “marginal,” it converts the devastating meaningfulness of persistent crises to that of a simple statistical aberration. By disregarding intersectional detail, it obliterates how caste, poverty, and gender are complicit. And, by ignoring certain crimes, the NCRB builds a semblance of peace.
To think of a 3% increase as being “marginal” does not grapple with the implications of suffering from systemic violence or marginalization. Each number signifies a life subjected to fear, shame, and bureaucratic indifference. The NCRB’s visibility is selective. It only displays what the State is open to confronting.
When data conceals more than it presents, counting becomes collusion. To genuinely see the reality of gendered violence in India today, you need to see beyond the numbers, in survivors, in silence, in omissions, etc. Because in the measures of oppression, what the State frames as marginal is often collected in massive quantities.
(The legal research team of CJP consists of lawyers and interns; this resource has been worked on by Preksha Bothara)
Image Courtesy: indiatoday.in
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