NEW DELHI: Was 2012 the most dangerous year for women in the capital in the recent past? One statistic would seem to suggest so: the proportion of rapes committed by men who were strangers to the victim rose above 2% for the first time in five years to cross 10%.

'Stranger rape' of the type that occurred in Delhi on December 16 last year tends to form the basis for women’s perceptions of public safety, but is relatively rare. Rape in India, as in the rest of the world, remains overwhelmingly a crime committed by persons known to the victim. At the all-India level, less than 2% – 453 in all — of the nearly 25,000 rapes registered during the year 2012 were committed by strangers, data released on Wednesday by the National Crime Records Bureau show. In Madhya Pradesh, the state that consistently records the largest number of rapes, all of the 3,425 assaults were by persons known to the victim.

In Delhi too, the proportion of stranger rapes has hovered close to the 2% mark over the last five years. However 2012 NCRB data for Delhi show that 63 of the 585 rapes that were committed in 2012, or nearly 11%, were by strangers to the victim.

While data for Delhi have been stable over the previous years, large swings between years for a few other cities raise some doubts over the accuracy of NCRB data. Bangalore is the most extreme example of this: the proportion of ‘stranger rapes’ in the southern city swung from 77% to 0% between two consecutive years, 2009 and 2010. Karnataka’s crime statistics chief had earlier told TOI that it was probably a problem with the numbers. “In Bangalore and Karnataka, as in the rest of the country, rape by strangers is a very small part of total rapes,’ Praveen Sood, additional DGP, Karnataka State Crime Records Bureau, had told TOI. A spokesperson for the Delhi police said he could not comment without the exact numbers in front of him.

It’s too soon to draw conclusions based on one year’s data, agreed Kalpana Vishwanath of the Delhi-based women’s rights organization Jagori. “It’s undoubtedly a fact that there is crime against women, but there also seems to be some slight increase in the last six months. There is greater family and community support to girls who want to speak out, and a little less of blaming the victim,” Vishwanath said.

Victims of rape also tend to be younger in cities than in the rest of the India, more so in Delhi. In the cities for which NCRB provides data, just over half the rape victims were aged 18 or less. The corresponding all-India figure was just 36.5%. In Delhi, 329 of the 585 victimes, or about 56.2% were aged 18 or less.

