Women’s suicides are a national crisis. Urgent policy attention is needed

Last month, a young gang-rape victim in Nuh, Haryana, died by suicide after enduring blackmail via video recordings of her gang-rape, turning the spotlight again on women’s suicides under suspicious circumstances. In a spate of similar cases over the years, inquiries by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), police, and cybercrime units have sometimes led to arrests. However, in many such cases, acquaintance speculations, media reports, and public discourse about whether death was a result of suicide or murder (including murders covered-up as suicides) are disturbing. While such a distinction is important from a legal perspective for formulating charges (for instance, murder, criminal conspiracy, abetment to suicide), narratives insinuating that the victim’s suicide significantly lessens the seriousness of crimes committed by guilty parties if it wasn’t murder, needs serious socio-legal and ethical interrogation. That women die after experiencing injustice, including cases revealing concerted efforts at targeting, silencing, and character-assassinating now-dead rape victims while the women were still alive, should shock us as a society and a nation.

When I was a student in the United States, a major strand of my scholarly research concerned women’s suicides, a topic that has increased in relevance over the years. While official data on suicides tends to be unreliable due to widespread under-reporting as well as misclassification as accidents due to stigma, the available data is enough to point to continuing high rates of suicide, with nearly 40% of global female suicides occurring in India, despite having only around 17% of the world’s total female population. 

Reports of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), India’s apex government body responsible for collecting annual macro-level data on accidental deaths and suicides, shows India has one of the highest rates of suicide in the world. NCRB’s most recent available reports (until 2024, since data for 2025 has not yet been released) show that between 2018 to 2022, there was a yearly rise in overall suicide rates, from 10.2 in 2018 to 11.3 in 2020 to 12.4 in 2022, the ten-year period of 2012-2022 showing an increase in the all-India rate of suicide from 11.2 to 12.4. In 2022, there was an increase in suicide rates of approximately 4% compared to 2021 and 27% compared to 2018, making the number of suicides in 2022 in India the world’s highest. In 2023, suicides recorded an additional increase of 0.29%, making the number of suicides the highest in over a decade. In 2024, there was a marginal decrease of 0.4%. Women’s suicides comprise a significant chunk in this data. In 2021, more than 45,000 women died by suicide. For 2022-2024, the figures for women’s suicides are between 45,000-48,000. Yet women’s suicides continue to receive comparatively less policy and scholarly attention.

My research has focused on a particularly vulnerable cohort among women dying by suicide: rape victims. Analyzing qualitative sources such as news reports, suicide notes, judicial judgments, film and documentaries, and governmental and non-governmental policy documents, supplemented by quantitative data, I demonstrate the reasons for rape victims’ suicides: social stigma, victim blaming, excessive mental trauma as a result of group bullying, inadequate emotional support networks, and, in some cases, lack of legal justice. My research, whose theoretical and applied findings I presented at various public lectures, conferences, and seminars during my years of teaching in the United States after completing my PhD, such as an invited seminar at Harvard University, the Yale Modern South Asia Conference, and the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, analyzes suicides in private as well as public spaces. 

I began this research after being shocked by the case of a poor woman who died by public suicide after being raped by policemen, followed by a cover-up to shield her rapists, and a denial of legal justice due to delays in forensic evidence. The Punjab and Haryana High Court took suo-moto notice of her public suicide and she was awarded posthumous justice following a CBI enquiry leading to the rapists’ arrest. Earlier, another young woman was gang-raped by five men, including her boyfriend. The rapists’ network targeted and character-assassinated her, leading to her suicide. In that case, the National Commission of Women (NCW) castigated some media channels for character-assassinating the victim. Unfortunately, such suicides by rape victims occur every month, every year. Last year a 23-year-old disabled Dalit woman in Uttar Pradesh died by suicide after being gang-raped. Last month, a doctoral scholar died by suicide after enduring rape and blackmail via video-recordings of her rape (names withheld on purpose.)

As an Associate Professor of International Relations, my work has consistently engaged the intersections between Women’s Studies, Global Affairs, and Area Studies, rooted in the conviction that nations cannot formulate gender-sensitive foreign policies without a simultaneous attention to gender-sensitive domestic policies, that should be seen as an integral part of inclusive development. As a society, we should not need women to die in order to feel compassion for them. Cross-sectoral policy interventions are required to address this urgent socio-legal, criminological, and public health crisis.

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