A woman in Rajasthan’s Jhunjhunu district allegedly beat her drunk husband to death in retaliation to his beatings. The husband was a daily wage labourer. When he returned home drunk and started to assaulted her she retaliated and thrashed him with a cricket bat. The woman was arrested on Sunday. The incident happened on Saturday in Balmiki Colony. (Source NDTV)
Similarly a woman in Delhi’s Dwarka attacked a delivery boy with a knife in a residential area for seemingly no reason at all. She also attacked everybody else who tried to intervene including the police. She damaged the police van. The people in the residence are saying she lives alone and is irritable and picks up quarrel. It is likely that she has a mental health issue, something which is often ignored.
While there is no denial that “woman” “men” these are not biologically determined monolithic categories. ‘Women’ is a diverse category of people including criminals but the number of crimes, and the violence with which they are committed, are far less amongst women than men. Research shows that woman-criminals are as much a victim of patriarchy, poverty and other social conditions as the women who are victims of gender based violence.
According to a 2018 report by LiveMint the number of women in conflict with law is increasing. Though in comparison to men who are arrested under various crimes it is still much lower. For total cognizable crimes in 2016, 3.54 million men were arrested while the number of women arrested was a far lower 193,241.
According to research conducted by scholar Anupma Kaushik in women prisoners in three prisons in three states, Punjab, Varanasi and UP most women convicts were found to be illiterate, married, Hindu or Sikh, house wives or labourers belonging to general caste or other backward castes (OBC). Most of the convicted women prisoners were convicted of murder of their daughter-in-law/sister-in-law means a dowry related matter. Dowry system itself being an oppressive patriarchal system these women themselves are also victims. The study also mentioned that child marriage i.e., trying to get a child married, dowry related murder and cruelty and sexual offence are soreme of the crimes under which most women criminals are arrested in India. The other frequent crime in which women are arrested are petty theft and child abduction.
From a critical feminist perspective, all crimes and criminals, be it men or women, are consequences of social factors such as poverty, illiteracy, caste, religion, social status and other intersectionality but women are doubly marginalized and vulnerable due to patriarchy. It would be a gender stereotype to assume that women cannot take to crimes just because of their biological sign. More research is required to understand the nature and causes of criminality amongst women.
