A nomadic woman near Water Works Road. A girl with a cognitive disability in Kunzer. A twelve-year-old in Galwanpora. A woman filmed in a park in Jalsheeri. The honest answer to this question is not a simple yes or no, and it cannot be found in one statistic, one arrest, or one headline.
According to reports from the area, she had been out herding her cattle. An ordinary evening chore, done a thousand times before, in a place she knew well. By the time she was taken to hospital, the Bakerwal woman near Water Works Road was already dead. She had a name, a family, a life — none of which survives easily inside the language of a crime statistic.
In nearby Kunzer, a girl with a cognitive disability was found to be about 25 weeks pregnant. She could not identify her attacker herself. It took a forensic DNA test, not her own voice, to establish who the biological father was. Elsewhere, in May 2026, a twelve-year-old went missing one evening in Galwanpora, Budgam, and was found dead the following morning in a nearby field; police subsequently registered and investigated it as an alleged rape-and-murder case. In Jalsheeri, Baramulla, a 21-year-old woman alleged that two men sexually assaulted her, filmed the incident and later showed the footage to others. And in Bandipora, police said two men who were not known to the victim, a 12-year-old girl, were arrested within about 12 hours of the alleged assault being reported.
These cases are disturbing enough on their own. Put together, they create a different kind of danger — the temptation to turn a run of horrifying incidents into a claim that sexual violence in Kashmir is rising every year. The official numbers do not support that. If this conversation is going to be a serious one rather than an outrage cycle, the first responsibility is to say plainly what the data actually show, even when it complicates the argument we might want to make.
What the Numbers Actually Show
Start with the fact that has to be stated first, because it cuts against the instinct to declare a crisis: registered rape cases in Jammu and Kashmir have not been rising every year. In the NCRB data available for 2021–2023, the count stood at 315 in 2021, 287 in 2022, and 231 in 2023 — a falling trend, not a rising one. It would therefore be factually wrong to say rape cases here are increasing year after year. The official record says the opposite.
But a falling number of registered cases does not automatically mean women have become safer. NCRB statistics measure what enters the criminal-justice system. They cannot, by themselves, measure the incident never reported, the victim too afraid to approach police, the family that chooses silence, or the woman who decides that pursuing a case will cost her more — socially or economically — than staying quiet. None of that means every decline in registered crime is artificial. It means registration data and actual prevalence are not the same thing, and sexual violence is precisely the kind of crime where reporting can be affected by stigma, family pressure, fear and the relationship between victim and accused. A falling graph is therefore a reason to look closer, not a reason to declare either a crisis or a victory.
Crimes against children followed a similar arc before recently levelling off: 606 cases in 2020, 845 in 2021, 920 in 2022, 910 in 2023, and 887 in 2024, the latest year covered by the figures cited here. Within that 2024 figure, kidnapping and abduction accounted for 243 cases, while offences registered under the POCSO Act totalled 308. It is worth being precise here: a POCSO case is not automatically a rape case, since the law covers a range of sexual offences against children, and treating all 308 cases as equivalent to rape would misstate what the data says. Still, 887 registered crimes against children in a single year is not a small number, and behind every registration is a child whose life has been affected in a way no annual table can adequately convey.
The Person She Knows
One of the most uncomfortable facts in this entire subject is that, in registered rape cases, the accused is very often not a stranger. NCRB data found that 91.4 percent of the accused involved in registered rape cases in J&K in 2021 were known to the victim. In other words, the person accused was usually already part of the victim's social world, rather than a complete stranger. That statistic should sit uneasily with anyone because it complicates the picture most of us carry by default. It means the question "is it safe for a woman to walk alone at night?" is incomplete on its own. The harder, more useful question is whether she is safe inside the relationships and spaces she is supposed to already trust — a question no streetlight or police patrol was ever built to answer.
For many families, the calculation that follows can be painfully simple: weigh stigma against justice, weigh the consequences of reporting against the consequences of silence, and sometimes choose silence. That silence can then narrow what daughters and sisters are allowed to do afterward, not necessarily because the world became more dangerous overnight, but because the family no longer trusts it to respond correctly when something goes wrong. A girl kept home "for her own safety" after an assault has not necessarily been protected in the deeper sense. She may instead have been taught, at an age when she is still learning what the world owes her, that her freedom must shrink because someone else chose to harm her. Responsibility quietly shifts — away from the person who did the harm and onto the person expected to avoid it.
When an Arrest Isn't the End of the Story
Some recent cases show how quickly investigators can act when evidence and investigative resources come together. Budgam, Bandipora and the May 2025 case near Water Works Road in Nishat all resulted in arrests within a relatively short period. In Budgam, police said an arrest followed within roughly 36 hours. In Bandipora, police said two men unknown to the victim were arrested within about 12 hours. The Kunzer case, involving a girl with a cognitive disability, took longer but ultimately demonstrated the value of forensic DNA evidence in identifying the biological father. There is something important in that: investigative tools such as DNA testing and digital evidence can give police avenues that were once much more difficult to pursue.
But an arrest is not a conviction, and Kashmir's own courts have recently shown why that distinction runs in both directions. In a POCSO matter involving Katra, the Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh High Court refused to let the investigation simply end after DNA evidence excluded the original suspect. The court criticised the investigation and directed further investigation, underscoring a basic principle: clearing one suspect is not the same as solving the crime. The criminal-justice system has to do two things simultaneously — protect innocent people from being wrongly prosecuted and ensure that an investigation does not stop merely because its first suspect has been eliminated. A wrongful arrest costs an innocent person his liberty and reputation; a case closed too early can leave the actual offender free.
Kashmir's history holds an older, more sobering lesson about how long "the end of the story" can actually take to arrive. In 2007, 13-year-old Tabinda Gani was abducted on her way home from school in Batpora, Langate — a village within Handwara tehsil, in Kupwara district, which is why different reports name the location differently. She was abducted, raped and murdered, her throat slit, and her body found in an orchard. Police arrested four men — Sadiq Mir and Azhar Ahmad Mir, both residents of Langate, and Jahangir Ansari and Suresh Kumar, from West Bengal and Rajasthan respectively. After a seven-year trial involving more than 80 witnesses, the Principal District and Sessions Judge in Kupwara convicted all four in April 2015 and sentenced them to death, calling it a "rarest of rare" case comparable to the 2012 Delhi gang-rape and murder.
That verdict was not the end. The convicts appealed to the High Court, and in October 2024 the death sentences were converted to life imprisonment, the court finding that the case did not meet the "rarest of rare" threshold applied by the trial court. Tabinda's father, Abdul Gani Shah, has spent nearly two decades living with his daughter's absence in the same village where she was killed. Whatever verdict a family is hoping for at the start of a case, the distance between a 2007 crime, a 2015 death sentence, and a 2024 conversion to life imprisonment illustrates something worth sitting with: a trial-court verdict can be a genuine milestone, and still not be the finish line. For families living through that gap, "the case is decided" and "justice has arrived" are not always the same sentence.
A Danger With a Much Longer History
No honest account of a Kashmiri woman's safety can skip February 23, 1991. That night, soldiers of the Indian Army's 4 Rajputana Rifles cordoned off the twin villages of Kunan and Poshpora in Kupwara district during a search operation. Villagers alleged that men were taken outside for questioning while women remained inside their homes and were sexually assaulted during the night. A subsequent local inquiry recorded allegations of rape, while human-rights organisations and survivors have maintained that the assaults occurred.
The case remains deeply disputed more than three decades later. A Press Council of India team led by journalist B.G. Verghese rejected the allegations and described them as fabricated, while Army officials have continued to defend that position, including a senior commander as recently as 2022. Survivors and rights groups have maintained the opposite account, and 2014 J&K High Court proceedings became an important part of the later legal history of the case, including directions concerning consideration of compensation for the survivors. No individual has been criminally convicted for the alleged assaults. This article does not treat either side's account as an uncontested judicial finding. What can be said is that the allegations have remained unresolved for decades, and that longevity itself raises difficult questions about the ability of institutions to conclusively establish what happened.
Researchers studying Kashmiri women have also documented a related and less contested pattern: decades of checkpoints, curfews, conflict and insecurity narrowing what women could safely do, where they could go and with whom. One consequence was the emergence of the term "half-widow" for women whose husbands disappeared without a confirmed death, leaving them to navigate inheritance, property and social questions in circumstances where a death certificate might never arrive. The experience was not simply emotional; it could create long-term legal and economic uncertainty, while social suspicion could make remarriage and independent life more difficult.
Behind Closed Doors
The danger that draws the least public attention may be the one that happens where society expects women to feel safest. Official data presented in J&K showed that domestic-violence cases recorded through One Stop Centres increased from 893 in 2023–24 to 1,979 in 2024–25 — an increase of more than 121 percent, with 2,872 cases recorded across the two financial years. These figures do not represent every instance of domestic violence in the region; they represent cases that reached the relevant support system. But the increase is significant enough to demand attention.
Those figures are only the visible edge of a problem that can remain hidden for years. Marital abuse, violence involving in-laws, economic dependence, fear for children and pressure from relatives can all make reporting extraordinarily difficult. A woman may know that something is wrong and still believe that approaching the police or a support centre will destroy the only social and economic structure she has. That is one reason domestic violence cannot be understood simply by counting FIRs or support-centre cases; the number of women who never enter those systems remains unknowable.
Women's access to help has also faced periods when communication itself was severely restricted. During the communications restrictions that followed the August 2019 changes in Jammu and Kashmir, and again during COVID-19 lockdowns, women seeking assistance could face difficulties accessing communication channels. For a service designed to help women in crisis, the ability to communicate is not a minor administrative detail. It can be the difference between a woman being able to seek help and being left alone with the person threatening her.
When More Women Seek Help
There is also real evidence that more women are using formal support mechanisms. According to government data, cases recorded through the Women's Helpline 181 in J&K rose from 1,061 in 2023–24 to 4,171 in 2024–25 and then to 28,215 in 2025–26. One Stop Centre beneficiaries also increased over the same period, from 2,374 to 3,605 and then to 4,785. The numbers are striking, particularly the increase recorded through the helpline in the most recent year.
But these figures deserve the same caution as the falling rape numbers, applied in the opposite direction. A sharp rise in women seeking assistance could mean that violence has increased. It could also mean that awareness has improved, that support services have become more accessible, or that women have become more willing to approach institutions — or that several of these factors are operating simultaneously. The numbers alone cannot tell us which explanation is responsible. Treating every increase in help-seeking as proof of rising violence would therefore be just as misleading as treating every fall in registered crime as proof that violence has disappeared.
The Camera as a Second Weapon
One detail has appeared in several recent cases: the phone. In Baramulla, the accused allegedly did not simply assault the 21-year-old woman; they also filmed the incident and later showed the footage to others. The alleged recording became another means of intimidation, with the survivor reporting that she had been threatened and delaying her approach to police. Investigators were subsequently able to use digital and human intelligence as part of the investigation. The case illustrates a disturbing contradiction of modern technology: the same device that can preserve evidence can also become a weapon used to keep a victim silent.
The Kunzer investigation demonstrated the same principle from a completely different direction. There, the crucial evidence was not a recording but DNA. Investigators were able to use forensic testing to establish biological parentage in a case involving a vulnerable minor who could not identify her attacker herself. In one case, technology helped trace people through a digital trail; in the other, it helped establish biological identity. That is real progress in investigative capability. But technology does not automatically make women safer. The same tools can help investigators establish the truth, or can be used by perpetrators to threaten, humiliate and silence survivors.
So, How Safe Is She?
The honest answer refuses to fit into one word. Kashmir is not the uniquely dangerous place its harshest critics sometimes claim — its registered rape numbers are falling rather than rising. But it is equally wrong to turn that decline into a declaration of safety. A high proportion of accused persons being known to victims, a sharp rise in domestic-violence cases recorded through One Stop Centres, a dramatic increase in women seeking help through the 181 helpline, and a series of serious cases involving women and children all show why the question cannot simply be reduced to whether one particular crime statistic has moved downward.
The important point is not that Kashmir is somehow uniquely violent compared with every other part of India. Serious sexual violence, child abuse and domestic violence occur across the country. What makes the Kashmir conversation particularly complicated is the additional weight carried by every case — because questions about crime, policing, social restrictions, conflict and governance often become intertwined. That does not make the underlying violence statistically worse. It does, however, make it harder for an individual case to remain simply what it is: a woman or a child who has been harmed and deserves a thorough investigation, a fair trial and an actual conclusion.
An arrest is not a conviction. A falling crime rate is not a safe society. A rise in helpline cases is not, on its own, proof that violence is increasing. And a trial-court verdict is not necessarily the end of a family's wait for justice — Tabinda Gani's case took eight years to reach the 2015 trial-court death sentence; by the time the High Court altered those sentences in 2024, seventeen years had passed since her murder. The more difficult truth is that women's safety cannot be measured through a single government chart. It has to be understood through the quality of investigations, the willingness of victims to report, the response of families and communities, the accessibility of support services, and the ability of courts to distinguish between an allegation and a proven crime while still ensuring that genuine offenders are held accountable.
So, how safe is a woman in Kashmir? Safer than the most alarmist narratives sometimes suggest. Less safe than a falling crime graph can prove. The answer cannot be found in one year's rape figures, one arrest or one headline — nor by telling women simply to come home before dark. The more meaningful question is whether a woman can live her ordinary life without calculating every movement against the possibility of violence, and whether, if violence does occur, she can trust the institutions around her to respond quickly, fairly and effectively. The family of the woman near Water Works Road will not be comforted by a statistic. The survivor in Baramulla will have to live with what happened long after the headlines disappear. And somewhere, right now, another daughter is being told to be home before dark — perhaps because her family believes the world outside is too dangerous. But the solution cannot be to teach an entire generation of girls that their freedom must shrink because someone else might harm them. The responsibility belongs to the person who commits the violence, and to a justice system capable of investigating it properly, protecting the innocent, supporting the survivor, and holding the guilty accountable when the evidence establishes guilt. Until that becomes ordinary rather than exceptional, the question will keep returning — and it deserves an answer built neither on panic nor on comfort, but on evidence, accountability, and the lived reality of the women and girls behind the numbers.
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