#IDEVAW2022 | Can gender-sensitive police reforms help combat gender-based violence in India?
J-PAL South Asia
J-PAL South Asia at IFMR. J-PAL's mission is to reduce poverty by ensuring policy is informed by scientific evidence.
#InternationalDayforEliminationofViolenceAgainstWomen | An estimated four in ten women in India have experienced gender-based violence (#GBV), but these crimes often go unrecorded, inhibiting women's access to the justice system.
Can gender-sensitive police reform help address this crisis??
From 2018 to 2022, a study by Sandip Sukhtankar , Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner, and Akshay Mangla, conducted in partnership with the Madhya Pradesh Police, evaluated the impact of introducing women’s help desks in 180 police stations serving 23 million people in the state.
As a part of this study, police officers were trained on gender sensitization and case registration procedures.
The intervention consisted of four primary components:
??Creating private, safe spaces in stations for women seeking assistance?
?? Training officers on how to register cases involving crimes against women
??Conducting outreach to local women’s and community safety networks
?? Assigning female officers to run the help desks.
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The police stations participating in the study were randomly divided into three groups in order to test the effectiveness of these measures on officers’ responsiveness to women’s claims and the subsequent registration of cases:
??Control stations without help desks
??"Women-run" desks with assigned female officers
??"Regular" desks that did not specify the gender of the assigned officer and were mostly run by men
Results
Stations with women's help desks saw a significant increase in First Information Report (FIR) and Domestic Incident Report (DIR) registration. This increase in FIR registration was driven almost entirely by help desks run by female officers.
Female police officers were also particularly responsive to gender sensitization training. They exhibited a change in gender attitudes, becoming more likely to believe rather than dismiss women's claims.?
This change was not seen in male officers.
Based on these results, the Madhya Pradesh Police Department is scaling up the program to 700 police stations, serving most of the state. You can hear more about the study & how this collaboration developed from JPAL-affiliated professor Sandip Sukhtankar.
Obama Scholar | Ashoka Fellow ; Criminal Justice | Gender Justice
2 年This is inspiring. Please check our work in reducing violence and crime against women at Project Unlearn (www.projectunlearn.in). Our facilitators are men with history of conflict with law, they have lot of insights on police reforms and intersection of GBV.