Editorial: Murder most foul

A series of murders involving post-mortem mutilation of bodies to facilitate their disposal has horrified India in the past fortnight. These incidents bring to the fore the issue of intimate partner violence and pose the question whether we have a copycat crime phenomenon on our hands, possibly due to the influence of media.

In one incident, a 56-year-old Mumbai man is alleged to have murdered his 32-year-old live-in partner, sawed her body into more than 20 pieces using a tree cutter, boiled the parts in utensils before trying to dispose them. The trigger for his macabre actions was no more than a common domestic dispute. In another incident, also in Maharashtra, a man is alleged to have killed his wife, decapitated the body with the help of his brother, cut it into three pieces and threw them into a river. In the same vein, a priest in Hyderabad killed his lover during a drive out of town, wrapped the body in polythene packaging and dropped it into a manhole, which he proceeded to cover up with two truckloads of dirt.

What is obviously common to these unrelated crimes is the macabre modus operandi. They bring to mind similar sensational murders reported in the recent past, such as the Shraddha Walkar case in New Delhi. It also gives rise to the perception that the desecration of the dead is happening more frequently than before. It well might be. Or it may be a case of frequency illusion, a cognitive bias which leads us to believe that an incident is happening more frequently once we have become aware of it.

While NCRB data shows that crimes against women increased 15.6 percent in 2021 over 2020, in the absence of more granular data, we have no way of being sure whether modus operandi have become more gruesome than before, and, if so, why. Media inquiry has centred around the sensational details. This has only served to mask the more important factor in this phenomenon, which is that these crimes have all been perpetrated against intimate partners. It would be an altogether more useful line of inquiry to know what exactly is triggering the male tendency to turn violent against an intimate partner, and what socioeconomic factors are aggravating it.

We know from the latest iteration of the National Family Health Survey that 29.3 percent of married women have experienced domestic and/or sexual violence. The survey does not include unmarried women in its module on spousal violence, so we do not know the prevalence of violence against other types of intimate partners. What indicates the scale of the problem, however, is the fact that 90 per cent of the married women studied by the NFHS have never reported spousal violence to the police or healthcare professionals.

Whether or not this is just a case of frequency illusion, this situation calls for sustained and serious scrutiny, not sensationalism lasting one news cycle. We do have useful insights from the NFHS that spousal violence affects women from all walks of life. Widowed, separated or divorced women are more likely to be subjected to it as those with little education and low income. Similarly, women who have a job, those whose partners are unemployed, poorly educated, or alcohol-prone are also more likely to be subjected to such violence.

Institutions like the media, the police and academe and government departments would do better to fill the research gaps in this phenomenon rather than be consumed by the grim and sensory aspects of these cases.