Pocso Cases Up 7.12% in 2 Years in State: Report

The latest report of the Rajasthan Police showed that the cases of sexual violence against minors have gone up by 7.12% in 2024 compared to the last two years, despite the overall rate of crimes against women, including that of rapes and gangrapes of the women, declined by 13.95%.

- Senjuti Sengupta

JAIPUR:

The monthly crime report (MCR) of the Rajasthan Police has recently compiled the total number of crime cases till December 2024 and provided the comparison with the previous two years—2022 and 2023.

As per the MCR report, at least 2,182 cases were registered under the Protection of Children from Sexual Violence (Pocso) Act in Rajasthan in 2024, which was 2,110 in 2023 and 2,037 in 2022.

The report also classified that 1,610 of the total cases in 2024 were of rapes, including 489 gangrapes and 16 murders with rape, were registered. The figure is 10.12% up from 2022 when 1,462 minor rape cases, including 386 gangrapes and 11 murders with rape, were registered across the state. In 2023, a total of 1,558 minors were raped in Rajasthan, of whom 436 were also gang-raped and 11 were murdered after the rape, showed data.

This happened even at a time when the total number of women (above 18) who were raped in 2024 went down by 6.83% in two years, despite the figure remaining pretty high at 4,894. In 2023, at least 5,046 women were raped in Rajasthan and another 5,253 in 2022, the MCR report stated.

A decline was seen in other cases as well in 2024 that were listed under the "crimes against women" category. For example, there were a maximum of 24.55% dip in cases of harassment (under section 85 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita) in two years, followed by 14.86% in molestation, 10.02% in dowry deaths, and 0.56% in abduction cases, as per the MCR report.