Anandi Mani, an associate professor at the University of Warwick in Britain, is one of the authors of a study on women's political representation and its effect on crime in India. As the government reserves for women a third of all seats in local government institutions like the village council, the researchers sought to find out whether having female political leaders at the local level would have a positive effect on women. Instead, they found that the reported number of crimes against women rose. Ms. Mani explained in an e-mail interview with India Ink why that's not bad news.
Could you tell me a little bit about your study? Why did you want to do this study?
The Panchayati Raj [village council] reform law was passed officially in 1993 for local government. There has been a lot of resistance to repeated attempts to have similar reservation for women leaders at other levels of government. Some of the arguments aga inst such reservation have been that women who lack experience will not be competent leaders. There is also a perception that women political representatives may be just fronts for the political agenda of their husbands or other powerful males in their area.
One motivation for such a reservation is to improve outcomes for women directly. So we thought it would be interesting to examine specifically how having women political representatives has affected a very core outcome for women - safety and security.
Could you take me through the process and what you found?
When we looked at how crime outcomes against women changed before and after political representation, we found that crimes against women had increased overall, as well as in specific categories such as kidnapping and rape. This was very disturbing at first pass. It suggested that either there was a lot of resentment and retaliation against women leaders or that women lea ders were quite incompetent.
But we found that it was not explained by the incompetence of women political representatives, because there were no increases in crimes unrelated to women, such as economic crimes or kidnapping of men.
As researchers, we were also aware that official crime records data may not fully capture ground reality. Especially in developing countries, it could be fraught with problems in documenting crime. Typically, this would mean that crimes against women would be underreported. This could be either due to the prejudiced attitudes towards them from the police who may not record crimes against them. Or women themselves may be reluctant to report crimes because of shame or fear of retaliation.
In our particular context, we wondered whether this increase in crimes against women may actually be good news because women leaders may actually be encouraging more reporting of crimes against women. If we did not account for this, we could be ju mping to the wrong conclusions. Here is a recent example of how crime data can lead people to wrong interpretations/conclusions.
One way to check this could have been to match up official records with victimization surveys of individuals, which could tell us if official statistics are widely off from what individuals report when interviewed. Unfortunately, in the Indian context, the handicap is that no such nationwide surveys exist, unlike in other countries such as the U.S. So we decided to address this challenge by looking at different pieces of related evidence. Specifically, we looked at how responsive the police were to crimes against women and also women's perceptions of their interaction with law enforcement authorities.
What did you find?
We found that firstly women were more satisfied in their interaction with the police in areas where local government leaders were women. Secondly, not only the number of recorded crimes but also the number of arres ts for crimes against women was higher under women leaders. Both facts suggested that the police were being more responsive to crimes against women.
Based on nationwide surveys, we found that people do think that having influential people, such as their local government leader, on their side makes the police more responsive to their concerns when they go to the police station. All of this led us to conclude that the observed increase in official crime data was in fact good news, driven by greater reporting and recording of crimes rather than an actual increase in crimes against women.
The magazine Tehelka reported that many police officers have insensitive attitudes toward rape victims. What does your report say about this?
I am not surprised by this finding. In fact, this is consistent with the findings of a study on the police force in Rajasthan, which we cite in our paper. Only about half the cases of rape were documented by the police, whereas over 90 percent of crimes such as burglary were likely to be reported.
Anything else you found interesting in the study?
It was interesting to us that women political representatives had more of an effect on crime outcomes at the lowest rungs of government, where women victims have the greatest proximity or access to them. And this is despite the fact that women political representatives have no official authority over the police. Law and order falls under the control of state governments, not the local government. All this suggests that women leaders and representatives have an effect because women find in them someone who is sympathetic to their concerns and able to get the police to be more responsive.
I took a look at the latest crime bureau statistics and found that states, like Kerala, typically considered better places for women to live in, reported the highest crime rates against women. Does your study explain some of that phenomenon?
Again, this is c onsistent with our findings. We do find that in districts with higher literacy, having a woman leader increases the documented crimes against women. It is quite plausible that educated women are better equipped or empowered to report crimes committed against them. And that law enforcement officials take them more seriously.
What benefits in the long term can women expect from quotas?
Over the long term, political representatives could give women a better platform to have their voice heard in terms of what they expect from the governance process. We do find that over the long term, places that have had longer exposure to women leaders more often see a downturn in crime rates. Women leaders could be creating a virtuous cycle on crime outcomes because greater responsiveness of the police would encourage more women victims to come forth and hence deter crime over the long term.
Other related research has found that women tend to attend meetings more often and s peak up during them when there are women leaders. Political representatives could also encourage more women to stand for public office and participate in politics. Women leaders could be role models for the younger generation.
(Interview has been lightly edited and condensed.)
