Mayank Kumar
The word ‘crime against women has become a silent
epidemic with more & more cases of rape, molestation
& sexual assault being reported every year in India [1].
In India, a rape is reported every 15 minutes, according
to recently released official government crime data. Despite
various federal government campaigns such as Beti
Bachao Beti Padhao – ‘Educate the daughter, save the
daughter’ the crime rate per 100,000 women increased to
58.8% in 2018 in comparison with 57.9% in 2017. The
National Crime Records Bureau on October 21, 2019,
released its report for the year 2017, which stated that
359,849 cases of crime against women were reported in
the country. In addition, 237,660 cognizable cases were
registered in 2018, in which Delhi leads over 18 other
metro cities in terms of crimes, according to the 2018 edition
of the Crime in India report released by the NCRB
[2].
According to experts, only 10% of rapes are reported,
and the conviction rate for rape cases is 24.2%. Several
rape cases in India received widespread media attention
and triggered protests since 2012. This led the Government
of India to reform its penal code for crimes of rape
and sexual assault [3].
Some of the examples of brutal rape cases are (1) November,
1973: Aruna Shanbaug, a 26-year-old nurse, was attacked
by a ward attendant at a Mumbai hospital during
her night shift. Sohanlal Bhartha Walmiki, who was later
convicted and jailed. (2) 1990: Hetal Parekh, a 14-yearold
schoolgirl, was raped and murdered by Dhananjoy
Chatterjee in Kolkata. Chatterjee was sentenced to death
and hung in 2004; it was the first hanging in India in
13 years. (3) 1995: A Jaipur court acquits five men accused
of gang-raping Bhanwari Devi, a lower-caste woman
who worked with the Women’s Development Project in
Rajasthan in 1992. (4) 1996: Law student Priyadarshini
Mattoo was found raped and strangled in her Delhi flat.
Santosh Kumar Singh, a fellow law student and son of a
former senior police officer, was sentenced to death. (5)
December, 2012: A 23-year-old student was beaten and
gang-raped on a moving bus in the capital New Delhi and
later died of her injuries. Five men and a juvenile were
arrested - four of the men have been sentenced to death
and one hanged himself during the trial. The juvenile offender
was freed after completing three years in a reform
home. (6) January, 2018: An 8-year-old Muslim girl was
drugged, held captive in a temple and sexually assaulted
for a week before being strangled and battered to death
with a stone in Kathua town in northern India. Six men,
including a Hindu priest and three police officers, were
convicted of the crime. Three were given life sentence.
Owing to the increasing importance of genomic information,
obtaining genomic DNA from human nail material
and analysing using short tandem repeat (STR) profiling
from biological specimens has become more and more
important. An important aspect of violent crime investigations
is the identification of the persons that had the
last contact with the victim.
