Incidents of rape of children and women have been rising steadily and shockingly in Kerala for the past several years but this issue has allegedly been not getting the required attention from most of the political parties and rights organisations in the State that have been staging intense protests over similar incidents elsewhere in the country.
According to statistics compiled by the Kerala Police, there has been a 600-percent increase in crimes committed against children in the State in the past ten years. likewise, there has been a 500-percent increase in the cases of child rape registered in the State in the past one decade, data available with the State Crime Records Bureau (SCRB) show.
The Kerala Police had registered 1,101 cases of child rape in 2017 while the total number of child rape cases in the State in 2008 was 215. Apart from the small difference from this trend of rising cases seen in 2010 which recorded a decrease by 27 cases compared to the previous year, cases of child rape have climbed steadily every passing year in the State since 2008.
Cases registered in Kerala under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (Pocso) Act since it came into force have also shown a phenomenal increase. If the number of cases registered in the State under the Act in 2013 was 1,016, it had grown up to 2,611 cases last year, according to the SCRB data.
In 2015, this number had stood at 1,589, showing that there has been a 60-percent increase in the number of cases registered under the Pocso Act in the past two years. A total of 459 cases were registered under the Act in the first two months of the current year and if this can be taken as an indication, Pocso cases in Kerala this year will show a shocking rise compared to the last year.
The number of all crimes against children showed a 600-percent increase from 549 in 2008 to 3,478 in 2017. “What is surprising in these statistics is that the year-on-year increase has been steady. It suggests that the affinity to such crimes in Kerala has become a trend,” said a senior police official associated with the SCRB.
A similar trend can be seen in the case of crimes – including rape – against women in Kerala also. As per the SCRB data, the increase in the number of women’s rape cases in Kerala in the past ten years has been nearly by 360 percent. If the rape cases registered in this category in 2008 stood at 548, 1,987 such cases were registered last year.
While rapes constituted 13 percent of all the crimes committed against women in the State last year, 31 percent of all the cases of crimes against children registered in 2017 pertained to rape. This seems to be true in the case of records of crimes against children in Kerala in all the years since 2008.
“The data show that there is no room for relief even in the belief that the increase seen in the abominable atrocities towards children can also relate to the increasing readiness among victims and families to report such atrocities to the police. It is clear that something very serious is happening to the Kerala society in the new millennium,” said the police official.
While sociologists and psychologists relate the situation to some deep “social disease” that has gripped the Kerala society and the Kerala male sexuality since the start of liberalization, questions do arise about the difference in the attitude of certain political sections in the State towards incidents taking place in own backyard and in other States.
“Anything gets a political colour in Kerala, especially with the leftists and so-called liberals. They simply can’t view a crime as what it is – a crime,” says a Kochi-based writer. “So they interpret some cases as incidents of communal engineering and criminalization of society. It is good that they don’t use the same yardstick for what is happening here,” he said.