Violence Against Women: Can India’s All-Women Police Stations Deliver Justice?
First opened in Kerala in 1973, India now has over 700 all-women police stations. Puja Bhattacharjee finds that these AWPSs are mostly urban, understaffed, and largely unknown.
In 1973, India inaugurated its first all-women police station, the Vanitha Police Station, in Kerala. Trivia has it that the then PM had flown in to Kozhikode for the event, and happened to hand over her pen to the station’s first sub-inspector, M Padminiamma, when the latter was fumbling for one before signing the inaugural register.
Speaking to a prominent daily for the 50th anniversary celebrations of the police station, in October 2023, Padminiamma says that the main intention behind the all-women police station (AWPS) was to improve women’s access to justice in a very male-dominated system. “This was a formidable barrier, particularly for those who lacked educational empowerment,” she’s reported to have said.
What are AWPS?
All Women’s Police Stations (AWPSs) are specifically designed to be the first point of addressing crimes that typically affect women - the Indian Penal Code calls them VAW (Violence Against Women) and lists attempts of acid attacks, domestic violence, dowry harassment, sexual assaults etc under this category.
AWPSs are supposed to be fully staffed by women and were created to provide a safe and secure place for reporting abuse, without fear or intimidation. Unlike conventional police stations, AWPSs are built to be survivor-centric. Their all-women teams are trained to handle sensitive cases with empathy and confidentiality, ensuring that procedures like interrogation or frisking are carried out in a supportive environment.
In addition to investigations and apprehending offenders, women cops are trained to counsel, assist survivors in negotiating abusive circumstances, and link survivors to helplines, legal aid counseling, and temporary shelters, wherever required. This system is part of the government’s effort to ensure that affected women find help beyond the police station. They take on duties such as escorting female prisoners and handling petitions related to women’s rights.
AWPSs aim to make the justice system more accessible, offering women not just a place to file complaints, but a rare sense of safety and trust within the law enforcement system. This approach quickly gained traction, and by 2022, 745 of these stations, mostly in urban areas, were spread throughout India.
Establishing AWPS increased reporting of complaints
These stations are now more than just places to report complaints. Women can talk without fear of intimidation since female officers handle cases involving sexual assault, domestic abuse, and other gender-sensitive concerns. Numerous survivors have benefited from the program, which has also sparked similar initiatives in other nations, including Brazil, Argentina, Peru, the Philippines, South Africa, and Uganda.
In 2022, the Home Ministry mandated that every state and union territory set up a minimum of one all-female police station in every district.
In 2018, a collaborative research titled Gender, Crime and Punishment: Evidence from Women Police Stations in India, attempted to examine how far AWPS helped in improving reporting of gender-based violence (GBV) and influencing case handling, as measured by arrest rates, femicide incidence, and women’s labour supply, which were long known to be constrained by safety concerns.
The findings were striking. The evidence published showed that reports of violence against women increased immediately and persistently after a city established a women’s police station, by almost 29% on average.
Additionally, they discovered that recording of offenses against women increased by 22% as a result of the creation of AWPS. Increased reporting of domestic abuse and female kidnappings were the main causes of this spike.
According to Anupama Tandon, Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Economics, St. Bede’s College, Shimla, who is researching AWPS in Himachal Pradesh since 2021, found that complainants, especially women and girls, generally feel more comfortable talking to female police officers, ‘surrounded only by women.’
“In a general police station, the head may be a woman, but the person responsible for recording the FIR or entering data could be a man. This setup can make it uncomfortable for victims, as everyone can hear them. In contrast, an all-women police station has women in every role, from recording to data entry, which helps complainants feel safer,” she adds.
Tandon focused her data collection on domestic violence, child abuse, molestation, eve-teasing, and missing women, which she considers a critical parameter. Each district has only one AWPS but several general ones. By comparing per capita rates across stations, Tandon found that the AWPSs performed much better, particularly in tracing missing women.
Compared to Himachal, AWPS in Kerala and Tamil Nadu are performing notably well. They cater to larger populations and, importantly, have expanded into rural areas too. This wider reach has made a significant difference, Tandon believes. She couldn’t refer to any data.
Mangai Natarajan, Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, examined Tamil Nadu’s All-Women Police Stations in depth in her 2008 book Women Police in a Changing Society. Her research found that these stations have expanded and strengthened the role of women in policing, better addressing the needs of both female victims and offenders.
Natarajan notes that the growth and persistence of All-Women Police Stations across Tamil Nadu stand as proof of their success. As of 2023, the state now leads the country with 222 AWPS.
The Cornell researchers too mention in their study that not only Tamil Nadu implemented the WPS policy in an unprecedented form, they control 41% of all WPS in the country and have managed to evenly distribute the AWPSs across the state.
The Cornell study shows that victims prefer filing complaints at AWPSs, if these are available, or avail self-services such as helplines. As a result, there are modest improvements in arrest rates for female kidnappings –by 15%, simply because treatment of policing such offences also increased.
Women don’t know they have a choice
When Tandon initially started looking into AWPS, she thought about the cost and the main motive behind opening these women’s police stations. “Why not just strengthen traditional police stations?” She wondered.
She discussed this in her class and asked her students.
“The young women in my class had no idea that AWPSs existed. In Himachal, almost 90 percent of the population is rural. These students come from urban areas. Yet they didn’t know, not even those who lived close to an AWPS” says Tandon.
Himachal has 11 AWPS, all located in urban areas. Most women Tandon surveyed said they simply went to the nearest police station, highlighting proximity as a key factor that drove their decision. “We need such stations in rural areas,” she says. “No one will travel 50 or 60 kilometers in hilly terrain just to reach a women’s police station,” she adds.
The caste factor
According to a 2021 study conducted by The Reach Alliance, a group of international institutions, the majority of people in need of women’s protection services in India are still not receiving them. The obstacles go beyond remoteness or inadequate infrastructure.
Even in cases when services are available, women are frequently discouraged from requesting assistance due to ingrained gender norms, cultural expectations, and caste, class, and religious hierarchy.
Although the reporting of violence against women has increased, lower-caste and impoverished women are still unable to access AWPSs. Add to that - massive backlogs, which cause the overburdened police and court systems to drop or delay investigations.
Very few domestic abuse cases are reported anyway
Due to widespread distrust of law enforcement, only 3.5% of women who experienced domestic abuse in 2015 sought police assistance. Furthermore, even while AWPSs have boosted reporting, it’s still unclear if this has resulted in additional inquiries or legal actions. In 2017, only 1.63% of all cases were settled out of court.
Former IPS officer from Maharashtra, Meeran Chadha Borwankar, points out that AWPSs were relevant at a time when there were very few women in the police. “But with women now making up more than 12 percent of the force,” she argues, they should be spread across all field jobs. “There is no study to show that AWPSs perform better, at least I haven’t come across one. But there is a study on women’s help desks in Madhya Pradesh police stations, and those show good results,” she says to UpBeat in an email interview.
She stresses that expecting a female victim to travel 15–20 kilometers to reach an AWPS is unfair. Cases, she says, should be registered at the nearest police station. Instead of sidelining male officers, Borwankar believes they should be sensitised to handle crimes against women.
“Why distrust them only because of their gender? Many police officers are very sensitive to women’s issues.” According to her, AWPSs risk relegating women officers to only handling cases of crimes against women, when what they want and deserve are diverse duties across the service.
AWPSs face challenges during rescue operations, recovery of streedhan property, or arresting male accused persons, explains an officer-in-charge of an AWPS in West Bengal, wishing to stay anonymous. “Both men and women have their rights,” she says, adding, “A female police officer must be present when a woman is arrested, just as a male police officer is required when arresting a man. Without male staff, it becomes impossible to conduct medico-legal exams of male accused or even to produce them before the court.”
Despite being called an AWPS, some were actually headed by men, Tandon mentioned in her research. In two or three stations, “they said no female head has been appointed. So yes, these kinds of problems were there,” she notes. Most stations barely have permanent personnel - roughly two or three out of 20 staff members.
Improve perception of women police
In a research published in the International Journal Of Social Science and Economic Research (IJSSER), Amisha Sharma, a public policy enthusiast and inter-disciplinary researcher, argues that seeing women carry out law and order roles can be an empowering experience due to stereotypical assumptions of feminine traits, yet these same traits can come in the way of society’s perception about the efficiency of a woman police officer.
Affection, sympathy, and sensitivity can be construed as liabilities in law enforcement duties, she writes. As a result of this skewed perception, women in the police force sometimes attempt to overcompensate in order to match up to the hypermasculine subculture (page 6203). Hence, much work should be directed towards improving this perception not only among the society as a whole but also among the police force and women police officials.
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