Mumbai: The average day for 31-year-old Ganga (name changed for anonymity) starts at 6 am. She cooks and packs food for her children aged six and eight, drops them off at school and leaves for work. After nine hours at work, she comes back home and cooks dinner for the family. On most nights, her husband consumes alcohol and beats her.Ganga frequently tells employers and friends about her aching arms or hurting back from the previous night’s assault, often laughing it off as a routine occurrence. She has never reported the violence to the police or sought help from other community organisations.Once, the accredited social health activist (ASHA) who helped her during pregnancy, witnessed the violence and intervened, but not much has changed for her. “I am not going to get a lot of community or legal support – not even from my parents,” says Ganga, who works as a domestic worker and caregiver for an 85-year-old woman.She makes Rs 12,000 a month and sometimes earns a little extra doing domestic work in the neighbourhood. Her income is spent on her children’s education and groceries. Her husband irons clothes for Rs 200-400 a day, when there is work.Cases under “cruelty by husband or relatives” account for 27% of crimes against women across India, according to the 2024 report of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) released last month. Overall, cases of crime against women, including domestic violence, declined compared to 2023. However, attitudes towards gender equality are still unfavourable in India, according to multiple surveys and studies. Legal experts, researchers and family counsellors caution that the decline in cases is not necessarily a decline in violence.The numbersIn 2024, India recorded, on average, 50 cases of crime against women every hour. Crime rate – or cases per 100,000 women – fell from 66.4 in 2022 to 64.6 in 2024. Overall, cases of crime against women fell 1.5% compared to 2023 and domestic violence cases fell 10%, the data show.Table 1: Crime Against Women, 2022-2024Source: National Crime Records Bureau; Crime Against Women 2022, 2023, 2024; IPC/BNS Crimes 2022-2024; Police Disposal of Crime Against Women 2022, 2023, 2024, Photo: IndiaSpend.“I am not surprised if FIRs [first information reports] have reduced; the policy aims for that,” said Sonali Kusum, assistant professor at the School of Law, Rights and Constitutional Governance at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Women do not want to send their husbands to jail, especially when financially dependent and unable to support their children.“Many women who approach the legal system want the police or protection officers (POs) to issue warnings to their husbands to change their behaviour,” she explained. POs are quasi-judicial staff who serve as the interface between the legal institutions and the victims/survivors. “Sometimes, they want judicial separation or protection order under the Domestic Violence Act and not divorce. Matters escalate to criminal charges on a case by case basis, depending upon what the victims want,” she added.“Cases are not reported or escalated and intervention is not sought till the beating becomes life-threatening for women,” says Vibhuti Patel, social researcher and activist who has taught at SNDT Women’s University and TISS Mumbai.Even when the women come forward, most cases are dismissed as “family affairs” at the level of the complaint, explains Audrey D’mello, advocate and director at the Mumbai-based Majlis Legal Centre, which provides legal and social support to women and children facing sexual and domestic violence. “And many potential domestic violence complaints don’t get investigated by converting to FIR level,” they add.Shiyu Yuan, a researcher at the King’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, warns that crime data might be influenced by access, awareness and stigma and even willingness to report. Attitudinal data can help “show whether the underlying norms that tolerate or justify gendered control are actually changing,” she explained.Regressive attitudes persistA 2025 survey across 29 countries, which included 23,268 Indians over the age of 18, found that many people support gender equality in general terms, while feeling more uneasy when it affects concrete areas such as marriage, family authority, and domestic responsibilities. The survey was conducted by Yuan’s institute at King’s College, London, in partnership with Ipsos.The sample is a slice of India’s urban population across socioeconomic classes in metros and small towns, and the data are weighted so that the sample “best reflects the demographic profile of the adult population according to the most recent census data,” the methodology states.“What stands out in the India data is the coexistence of strong support for gender equality and strong concern that equality may have ‘gone too far’,” says Yuan. India is also among the countries most likely to express what people might call “equality anxiety.”Source: King’s Business School, King’s College, London, Photo: IndiaSpend.On the other hand, more than half of the respondents in India were likely to agree with strict gender roles in family or marital relationships, even as they gauged that their fellow Indians were more accepting of changing gender norms.For instance, 52% of respondents said they agreed, somewhat or strongly, that a wife should always obey her husband. But when asked about their perception of others in the country, about 30% each said more people agree, more people disagree or that equal numbers agree as disagree with the statement.Source:King’s Business School, King’s College, London, Photo: IndiaSpend.“This is relevant to domestic violence because violence against women is not only shaped by law or policing. It is also shaped by wider norms about authority, obedience, control, and whether women’s independence is seen as legitimate,” Yuan said. “If people support equality in principle while still accepting male authority within the household, then the social conditions that enable domestic abuse may remain in place, even where formal legal protections exist.”And these attitudes are not improving in the younger cohorts. Globally, Gen-Z men – born between 1996 and 2012 – tend to have more traditional views about both women’s and men’s roles in society, the survey found.Across Indian states, 22.3% of women aged 18-49 years who were ever married said they had faced physical and/or sexual violence from their spouse, down from 29.2% in 2019-21, India’s National Family Health Survey (NFHS) conducted during 2023-24 found. Only 14% of women who have experienced physical or sexual violence by anyone have sought help to stop the violence, the 2019-21 survey had found.Husbands who have completed 12 or more years of schooling are half as likely (22%) to commit physical, sexual, or emotional spousal violence as husbands with no schooling (43%), the survey had found. Ganga grew up in a village in Barabanki and completed high school. Her husband, who grew up in Lucknow, did not finish high school.Further, 71% women whose husbands often get drunk have experienced spousal physical or sexual violence, compared with 23% women whose husbands do not drink alcohol. Ganga’s husband gave up drinking when they got married, but went back to it after the children were born.“Domestic cruelty does not begin with physical violence; it starts with subtle, continuous emotional abuse that systematically destroys a woman’s confidence and leads her to internalise the blame when physical assault eventually occurs,” says Paramita Chakraborty, Pune-based psychologist with over 10 years of experience in individual, marriage and family therapy, including trauma and grief therapy.How the system fails womenOver the years, India introduced several laws to deal with domestic violence: The Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961, Section 498A in the Indian Penal Code in 1983 (now section 85, and 86 BNS), and the Protection of Women Against Domestic Violence Act (PWDVA) in 2005.“But the definitions are vague and women seeking to lodge complaints are not aware of the definitions,” D’mello says. The onus is on the legal system to register an FIR under Section 498A and run a full investigation. But usually, a non-cognizable complaint (NC) is filed, she says. An NC is a police report filed for minor offences like verbal abuse, simple threats, or minor property damage. For these offences, the police cannot arrest the accused or start an investigation without permission from a magistrate.“While lodging the incident report, the form under the PWDVA guidelines is made up of checkboxes and this loses the context of the case,” Kusum, who consults with the Maharashtra State Committee against Domestic Violence, under the Maharashtra State Commission for Women, added.“The main challenge is the lack of infrastructure and staff,” she explains. “Women are not comfortable reaching out to male POs and hence more women officers need to be deputed.”The PWDVA provided for appointment of protection officers to help with filing incidence reports, professional counselling, facilitating settlements as the first recourse; and guaranteed emergency shelter and medical care.In 2009, a Ministry of Home Affairs advisory cautioned that leaving the evaluation of marital cruelty to untrained police officers turned mediation into a tool that forced traumatised women back into dangerous households.The One Stop Centre (OSC) scheme, under Nirbhaya Fund, aims to support and assist women facing violence in public and private spaces, including domestic violence. There are 926 operational centres across the country, the government told Parliament in March 2026, adding that in a decade to 2025, over 1.3 million women have been assisted.But the project faces several challenges such as under-utilisation of funds, lack of awareness among key stakeholders, lack of convergence between OSC and other schemes like Women’s Helpline and legal aid, IndiaSpend reported in May 2023.“Most women are not able to find sufficient space at OSCs and shelter homes for their children, especially male children and hence are not able to utilise them,” Kusum says.The government also enlisted ASHA workers to identify signs of domestic violence and help with awareness and information on legal recourse. In 2022, Mission Shakti was launched to facilitate departmental convergence for victims of domestic violence alongside providing legal aid, shelter and rehabilitation to other crimes against women survivors such as trafficking, rape victims. That same year, the Supreme Court suggested that ASHA and anganwadi workers can be deputed to assist POs. We have contacted the Union women and child development ministry for comment. We will update this story when we receive a response.Ganga now has one aspiration: She wants to move out with her husband and children, and live as a nuclear family, which she feels may help her minimise the daily abuse. “I just want to be independent, my children to be educated well, and I want my husband to show some change in drinking and violent habits,” she says. “I don’t think approaching the legal system will solve this.”Saumya Tewari is an IndiaSpend contributor, she has earlier taught at TISS, Mumbai. Her research interests are public policy, elections, democracy and gender.This story was first published on IndiaSpend, a data-driven, public-interest journalism non-profit.