Crimes Against Women, Children, LGBTQ and Marginalised Groups (UGC-NET Unit I)

Classical victimology explained victimisation through lifestyle and routine activity: exposure to motivated offenders, proximity to crime, absence of a capable guardian. That framework fits property crime and stranger violence well, but it does not explain offences concentrated inside households, institutions and intimate relationships, where the victim did not choose the exposure.

The structural-vulnerability framework adds the victim's bargaining position relative to the offender and the state. A child has no independent legal standing. A woman in an economically dependent marriage risks housing and income by reporting a partner. An LGBTQ person in a jurisdiction that still criminalises or stigmatises their identity risks exposure by approaching police.

A disabled adult in institutional care may depend on their abuser for survival. In each case, the same feature that creates the vulnerability also blocks the exit route, which is exactly why the syllabus places these otherwise unrelated groups in one bullet.

For NET purposes, remember that intimate partner violence, dowry-related abuse and stalking are the largest share of crimes against women in victimisation surveys, and that their statute-level treatment, India's Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 and the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 among them, is a separate syllabus topic, not this one. What this bullet tests is the mechanism: economic dependency, shared housing and institutional distrust suppress reporting for women on the same logic covered in section 1.

Children sit at the extreme end of the same scale. India's Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 overrides conflicting law under Section 42-A and works alongside the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, backed by mandatory-reporting duties and child-friendly trial procedure. A candidate should be able to state, without needing the full statutory architecture, why children depend on an adult, sometimes the offender, to disclose at all.

Crimes against LGBTQ persons split into bias-motivated violence and harassment on one hand, and exposure to prosecution itself in jurisdictions that still criminalise same-sex conduct or gender variance on the other. Both depress reporting for the same reason: contact with the justice system carries a risk of further hostility rather than protection.

Ilan Meyer's minority stress theory (2003, Psychological Bulletin) is the working model here: distal stressors such as discrimination and violence, plus proximal stressors such as anticipated rejection and internalised stigma, predict higher underreporting to police.

On law, remember three reference points: South Africa's 1996 Constitution was the first in the world to explicitly bar discrimination on sexual orientation; India decriminalised consensual same-sex conduct between adults in Navtej Singh Johar versus Union of India (5 September 2018), which struck down Section 377 of the then Indian Penal Code to that extent; and the United Kingdom's Equality Act 2010 protects sexual orientation and gender reassignment across employment, services and hate-crime sentencing. Conversion practices, attempts to change orientation or gender identity through therapy or coercion, are increasingly banned for minors as a distinct legal harm.

The same framework extends to disability, caste, statelessness and homelessness. India prosecutes caste-based violence under a dedicated statute, the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, precisely because ordinary criminal law failed to register the coercive weight of caste hierarchy on a victim's willingness to complain. Stateless people and undocumented migrants often cannot approach police without risking detention, a vulnerability offenders exploit deliberately.

Men form a distinct hidden population inside this set. Masculinity norms attach specific shame to being a victim of sexual or domestic violence, and service systems, hotlines and survey questions were historically built around female victims, so male victimisation is undercounted rather than absent.

Across every group, three mechanics explain the reporting gap: shame, where the victim rather than the offender carries stigma; dependency, where the victim relies on the offender or an institution the offender controls; and institutional distrust, where the victim expects to be disbelieved or exposed to further harm.

Legal systems answer with anti-discrimination law aimed upstream at background prejudice and hate-crime enhancement law aimed downstream at sentencing, but both still depend on someone coming forward, which is why mandatory-reporting duties and third-party reporting channels close the gap more reliably than punishment increases alone.