How disability compounds violence against women

There is another, often sidelined, layer of violent crimes against women in India: that of women with disabilities. Disability and gender can become compounding factors that make women with disabilities extremely vulnerable to abuse and violence in India.

In the past couple of months, at least two instances of such crimes have drawn the attention of the mainstream media.

On August 21, a girl with speech and hearing disability died by suicide after she was allegedly gangraped in Ghaziabad. In Bihar, a 60-year-old man was arrested in July for allegedly raping an 18-year-old woman with a disability, based on CCTV footage of the incident. The woman, traumatised by the crime and aggravated by her disability, was unable to provide accurate information for the first information report.

Shaped by the identity of disability, such incidents are the tip of an institutionalised and structural pattern of violence that plays out in homes, state-run shelters, hospitals and courtrooms.

Missing data

The National Crime Records Bureau, in its report published in 2022, recorded 110 cases under Section 376(2)(l) of the Indian Penal Code which deals with punishment for the rape of “a woman suffering from mental or physical disability”. In the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita, 2023, which replaced the penal code, punishment for rape is dealt with in section...

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