The New Face of Female Criminality

The Siya Goyal case challenges familiar assumptions about gender, violence and the changing nature of crime in India.

Crime anywhere in the world, across time, culture and geography, has two clearly defined segments - the perpetrator and the victim. When women are ‘visible’ in media content, the manner of their representation reflects the biases and assumptions of those who define the public - and, therefore, the media agenda.

More than fifty years after the international community formally began to recognise the scale of gender inequality in every aspect of life, and despite the adoption of numerous measures to redress gender imbalances, the power to define public and media agendas remains largely a male privilege.

Bending Assumptions

However, the recent murder of Ketan Agarwal, by his fiancée Siya Goyal and her boyfriend, Chetan Chowdhary, by pushing him off a 400-foot cliff at Lohagad Fort in Maharashtra, appears to challenge the belief that men are more crime-oriented than women. Siya’s and Ketan’s families had arranged an extravagant wedding, with lavish venues, private planes and millions of rupees invested. Siya was already in a relationship with Chetan, whom she had met at a cricket match.

Investigators revealed that Siya allegedly confessed to choosing murder because she feared a family backlash and wanted to buy about three years for Chetan to establish his career. In their paper, Female Criminality in India: Prevalence, Causes and Preventive Measures, P.M.K. Mili and Neethu Susan Cherian state that, alongside the increase in the overall crime rate, crimes committed by women have also risen. In 2020, India saw a 10 per cent rise in women's arrests compared with 2015, while their convictions fell by 50.5 per cent over the five-year period, according to Fact Checker’s analysis of data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) and Prison Statistics India (PSI). By contrast, between 2015 and 2020, the number of men arrested declined by 21 per cent.

As part of a 16-day Media Monitoring Project in the Eastern Region, this participant had the opportunity to study, in detail, stories relating to gender in general and gender violence in particular in the Hindustan Times (English), Calcutta, during the Sixteen Days of Activism Against Gender Violence. The study was carried out in two phases to compare the visibility of gender issues in the print media before and during the fortnight.

One unique characteristic that emerged from the study in both phases was a visible rise in the reporting of crimes committed by women, particularly those in which men were reportedly the victims. This, however, does not mean that the increase in women committing acts of violence, individually or collectively, has in any way lessened either the incidence or the severity of violence against women.

Such crimes ranged from the alleged baby-lifting by Sangita Prasad in Siliguri to the Nagpur incident in which a rape survivor reportedly led a mob against her alleged rapists, and to a case in which a woman allegedly threw acid on a man, causing him grievous injuries, “after being fed up with the lessons in morality he was preaching to her every day.”

This slight but visible shift in the character of news against, rather than for, women raises several questions that require further exploration and analysis. Some of these questions are: (a) Are women really becoming more aggressive in expressing their anger, protest and violence? Or (b) do crimes committed by women simply attract greater news value and media coverage than they did previously?

Is this a reflection of a legal and judicial system that fails to mete out justice to women when they are victims of violence? Or is it a natural outburst stemming from decades of suppression and conditioning to accept violence as a part of life? Is this kind of news published primarily for its sensational value? Or is it a true indicator of a shift in the gender-linked pattern of violence, in which men have traditionally been the principal perpetrators?

Women in crime may be classified under three broad categories: women as victims of crime; women as perpetrators of crime, either as individuals or collectively in resistance to crimes committed against women; and women as participants in exposing crime and assisting in the arrest of offenders.

Social Discrimination

According to psychologist Anchal Bhagat, many female offenders have lost faith in the social and legal system. Women’s fate, she argues, is often one of deprivation rather than the enjoyment of constitutional rights and privileges. Discrimination within society exists from birth to death in many parts of India. In her work, Bhagat cites the well-known example of Phoolan Devi, a victim-turned-victimiser. Her transformation began when the law failed to deliver justice. Denied justice, Phoolan Devi became the notorious Bandit Queen before later entering politics. However, despite leaving behind her life of crime, she was eventually murdered by enemies she had made during that turbulent period. Bhagat concludes that compelling factors such as the lack of economic independence, social recognition and a respectable position in society probably force women like Phoolan Devi to take the law into their own hands. She emphasises that courts, while deciding such cases, must consider the circumstances and compelling reasons that led a woman to commit a particular crime.

Many cases in India show that women have been labelled “criminals” not because they possessed criminal tendencies but because male members of their families had been similarly labelled. This suggests that many thefts committed by women are not the result of psychological or social aberrations but of family and economic compulsions. In many crimes for which women are arrested, they play secondary or supportive roles. The Siya Goyal-Chetan Chowdhary case, however, appears to involve a diabolically planned murder, and it is certainly not an isolated example. Let us look at a few more.

The Ankit Jha case in Delhi, the Neeraj Sharma murder case spanning Delhi and Haryana, and the Priti Singh case in Uttar Pradesh all point towards a similar pattern. In each, investigators alleged that women, unwilling to accept arranged marriages, conspired with lovers to eliminate their fiancé or husband. The circumstances differed, but the underlying motif was strikingly similar: relationships formed before marriage allegedly culminated in carefully planned killings rather than broken engagements or divorce.

There is a need to understand the changing pattern of female criminality. Previously, women were often driven into crime as a means of self-preservation or as a form of revenge. Now, some recent cases appear to involve allegations of pre-planned, diabolical murders for reasons that could arguably have been avoided. Earlier, there were relatively few recorded instances of women being involved in heinous crimes.

Over time, however, the number of women arrested for more serious and sophisticated crimes appears to have risen. There is, therefore, a need to understand and address the changing pattern of female criminality before analysing appropriate correctional and remedial measures. What they certainly underscore is the need for deeper interdisciplinary research into female criminality, moving beyond stereotypes that portray women exclusively as victims or, conversely, sensationalise them as aberrant offenders. Only a more nuanced understanding can help shape informed public discourse and more effective legal and correctional responses. The print media, too, has a responsibility to report such cases with objectivity and honesty rather than dramatizing them as though they were film scripts.

(The author is a noted film scholar who writes extensively on social issues. Views personal.)