-The Indian Express While most incidents of rapes and molestation are never reported because of the social stigma attached to the crime, these, ironically, still form a bulk of the crimes against women that get registered with the police. The reporting of many other crimes, for example foeticide, is abysmally low. The number of cases registered for foeticide in the entire country in 2011 was only 132. In the two preceding years, this...

-The Hindu As Kashmir’s civil society and cultural groups remain lifeless, separatists have a field day to get the all-girl band shut Despite Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah’s reassuring tweets, the teenage members of the Valley’s first all-women rock band have gone into hiding immediately after receiving a threat of ‘social boycott’ from the Dukhataarn-e-Millat, a radical women’s outfit. Coming as it did after the fatwa from Kashmir’s head mufti, this...

-The Hindu Verma panel recommended fixing responsibility on superior officers The Centre has not accepted the recommendations of the Justice Verma Committee regarding punishment to government servants, particularly police and army personnel, involved in acts of crime against women. The ordinance, cleared by the Union Cabinet on Friday, aims at making changes in various sections of the Indian Penal Code dealing with crime against women. For instance, the three-member panel had suggested changes in...

-The Hindu The ordinance on sexual assault cleared by the Union Cabinet and signed into law on Sunday by the President is problematic, not in what it seeks to achieve, but in what it does not attempt to redress. If this is all that the government intends to do on the basis of the Justice Verma Committee report, then, quite worryingly, the nationwide protests and expressions of outrage at rape and...

-The Indian Express On the Delhi rape case, let’s keep the indignation, disturb legislative slumbers The Verma Committee Report (VCR) speaks against civil society and political rape cultures. The poignancy and urgency of the VCR owes much to the experience of conversing with rape survivors and traumatised children. A precious message of the VCR is this: one may not take law reform seriously without taking human and social suffering equally seriously. The committee...