LUCKNOW: Contrary to popular belief that only women face violence or torture in matrimony, 6,646 men even had to make SOS calls to UP police and asked cops to rescue them from their ‘violent’ wives in the past one year. Unable to handle the wrath of their spouses, the men were forced to seek police help and made SOS calls to UP-100.

However, the number of women complaining of matrimonial violence was much bigger at 1.53 lakh, amounting to an average of 419 complaints per day.

While analysing the data collected at UP-100, the police control room which completed a year of its operation on Saturday, officials found that close to 7 lakh complaints had been of domestic violence. UP-100 received a total of 43 lakh emergency calls seeking police assistance.

The analysis threw up some surprising results; it was observed that domestic violence instances were alarmingly higher in urban pockets than in rural ones. The highest number of domestic violence complaints came from Lucknow, followed by Gorakhpur, Kanpur, Allahabad and Agra.

Police-station wise, maximum complaints originated from Gorakhpur Kotwali (city) in Gorakhpur, which is geographically divided into 16 rural and 10 urban police stations.

In NCR, women staying under the limits of Loni police station in Ghaziabad were most vulnerable.

Additional director general of UP-100, Aditya

said, “We will share the research findings with police superintendents of the five districts since curbing crime against women is our priority. It was also interesting to know that more than 6,500 men complained of being battered by their wife”. Mishra is contemplating to rope in scholars from IIM and other universities for further research into sociology of crime in UP.