India: Only women cops to probe rape cases in Haryana

Submitted by Mastodon on Fri, 2014-02-07 06:16

Article here. Excerpt:

'Haryana Police declared on Thursday all cases of sexual violence will from now be investigated by woman cops.

The decision, the police said, was taken on the basis of recommendations by the Centre for sensitive and effective policing after Nirbhaya's gang-rape in New Delhi.

Haryana reported 927 rape cases in 2013 while the numbers were 686 in 2012 and 733 in 2011.

Implementing this move is, however, likely to be difficult as women form a small percentage of the total strength of the police force in Haryana. In Gurgaon, for instance, where the ratio of women cops to men is almost 1:10, the order from DGP S N Vashisht led to a reshuffle across the ranks.'

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... the typical issues (restricting investigators to only females means assistance or input from other investigators who happen to be men is now less or not available, etc.), this police dept. has also made it so female police will have a more restricted range of type-of-case exposure. Instead of rape investigations perhaps comprising 5% of their time, it'll jump to, let's say, 40-50%. In addition, they'll not only lose that experience opp'y, but it'll reduce their chances at getting into staff officer (command/policy) positions (well, maybe; depends on the dept.'s politics, too), since they won't have the same range of experience as their male colleagues and so be less-qualified. [But being less-qualified than others has never stopped a promotion when the promoter(s) have their own reasons to ignore this fact; a few: family relationships, personal connections aside from family, having the goods on the promoter in some way, external force such as "affirmative action", public opinion, threats of legal action even if unbased, etc.]

In any case, victims of actual forcible rape in Haryana just had their chances of justice seen reduced.

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Submitted by Matt on Sat, 2014-02-08 16:44