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In this chapter, I explore two media texts, Imtiaz Ali's Highway and Alankrita Shrivastava's Netflix original series Bombay Begums (2021). I contend that recent filmmakers have begun to arguably reframe the narratives of rape victim-survivors and disrupting the cultural of silence described above. They offer progressive and multi-faceted representations of these experiences, such that there is an opportunity for a dialogue within both private and public spheres. What I mean when I say that they are ‘progressive representations’ is that the rape victim-survivors are not merely reduced to helpless women in distress, nor painted as vengeful, aggressive characters. Instead, their characterisation shows that they have agency and autonomy, but at the same time struggle with the repercussions of speaking out against their perpetrators in a society that does not support them wholly.

On 20 March 2020, the four adult convicts of the 2012 Delhi rape case were executed after a long debate regarding the punishment for their crime. The Delhi rape case, unlike others, was also given to the fast track court because of the worldwide outrage India received in its aftermath. Otherwise, most rape survivors rarely speak out and if they do, their lives are often endangered and threatened, depending on the severity of the case itself and the perpetrator's rank in the society. Through the analysis of Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury's, 2016 film Pink, and Ajay Bahl's film Section 375 (2019), this chapter explores the different ways in which mainstream Hindi cinema deals with such questions, especially in its depictions of courts. Both these films foreground India's contemporary cultural systems of fear that silence the rape survivors. They also imply that in the court cases, unless the specific court case faces intense global publicity, as was the case of the Delhi gang rape, rape survivors will never want to speak out. Moreover, the rape survivors will also hesitate to file a First Information Report (FIR) – a document that records crimes by the police against their perpetrators – limiting any possibility for justice for them. The laws surrounding rape cases are obscure and complex and finding justice for a rape victim (unless it is on a global level) is not an easy venture in India. At the time of the #metoo movement, the rape laws in India are not designed in such a way to arguably encourage victim-survivors to speak up. Instead, if rape survivors do decide to confront their perpetrators, they not only face ostracisation from society but also the danger of losing loved ones and endanger their lives as well.

This paper investigates the deterrence effect of development on crime against women in India. Specifically, the authors examine the deterrence effect of the composite development index, i.e. Human Development Index (HDI), along with other variables acting as development indicators such as women’s employment, the relative strength of women in the police force, urbanization, etc., on crimes against women.

This study adopts a fixed effect within-group (WG) panel regression model and pooled regression model on the data of 28 states over 20 years from 2000 to 2019. For checking the robustness of the results, the authors use the estimation from the system generalized method of moments.

The results confirm the deterrence effect of development as measured by the HDI and female labor force participation on various crimes against women. In addition, female feticide representing the socio-cultural attitude toward women turned out to be another significant determinant of almost all types of crime against women. Further, the study also finds the deterrence effect of variables such as police expenditure, the relative strength of women in the police force, urbanization and arrest rate on various crimes against women.

This research paper is unique because it tries to examine the deterrence hypothesis of development by taking a composite index of development, i.e. HDI and other variables at the state level in the Indian union.