Abused And Abandoned

As primitive and condemned methods are still being used for investigation, Uttar Pradesh has only 14 per cent conviction rate in rape cases.

- Kulsum Mustafa

While the majority of forums in the city choose to celebrate International Women’s Day amidst a lot of fun and gaiety and awards distribution for the women achievers Association for Advocacy Legal Initiatives (AALI), a feminist legal advocacy group working for socio-legal aid for women, adopted a different mode of saluting women. They invited the media to a panel discussion on combating violence against women and shared with them the data-analysis document they had prepared on this while doing research in 10 districts of Uttar Pradesh in 2016 While reporting of sexual offences against women and children has increased, yet justice is still delayed or denied in majority of the cases. .The report states that there is a mere 14 per cent conviction of rape accused in Uttar Pradesh against the national percentage of 26.

The findings of AALI, which has been working on the attainment and realisation of human rights of women for the past two decades, both shocked and at the same time, raised the level of concern of those working for the upliftment of womenfolk in the state.

Data suggests that Uttar Pradesh alone reported 35,527 cases of crimes against women in 2015, which is 10.9 per cent share of such crimes in India. A total of 34,651 rape cases (Section 376 of IPC) were reported in 2015. This is as per the latest National Judicial Data.

It is a fact that the state judiciary is overburdened. It has the highest pendency of cases in the country. It has almost 40 lakh criminal files pending as of July 2016. Each judge in Uttar Pradesh has an average pendency of more than 2,500 cases. There were many eye opening findings in the document brought out by AALI . The first being the unwarranted delay that the victims/survivors had to suffer while lodging their the FIR