Determinants of Crime Against Women in India: A Spatial Panel Data Regression Analysis

Abstract

Gender discrimination has been an important socio-economic and cultural issue in Indian backdrop; though India is one of the fastest-growing nations in the world but she has ranked 108th (out of 144 countries) in 2016 on the global gender gap index. In order to explore the determinants of crimes (such as dowry death, rape, molestation and torture) in India, we consider 24 states and five time points (over 1995–2015). Rank correlation over time clearly suggests that states exhibiting higher incidence of molestation experience higher incidence of rape; we get similar results in case of torture and dowry death as well. We employ both global and local Moran’s indices for dowry death, which has the least reporting bias, and observe that space as well as neighbourhood effect does matter; on the contrary, we find that other types of crimes vary randomly. Specifically, spatial panel regression results on dowry death clearly show that space along with neighbourhood effect does matter towards variations of dowry death; only two variables namely female work force participation and police station significantly reduce the incidence of dowry death.