The average day for 31-year-old Ganga* starts at 6 am. She cooks and packs food for her children aged six and eight, drops them off at school, and leaves for work. After nine hours at work, she comes back home and cooks dinner for the family. On most nights, her husband consumes alcohol and beats her.Ganga frequently tells employers and friends about her aching arms or hurting back from the previous night’s assault, often laughing it off as a routine occurrence. She has never reported the violence to the police, or sought help from other community organisations.Once, the accredited social health activist (ASHA) who helped her during pregnancy witnessed the violence and intervened, but not much has changed for her. “I am not going to get a lot of community or legal support – not even from my parents,” says Ganga, who works as a domestic worker and caregiver for an 85-year-old woman.She makes Rs 12,000 a month, and sometimes earns a little extra doing domestic work in the neighbourhood. Her income is spent on her children’s education and groceries. Her husband irons clothes for Rs 200- Rs 400 a day, when there is work.Cases under “cruelty by husband or relatives” account for 27% of crimes against women across India, according to the 2024 report of the National Crime Records Bureau released last month. Overall, cases of crime against women, including domestic violence, declined compared to 2023. But attitudes towards gender equality are still unfavourable in India, according to multiple surveys and studies. Legal experts, researchers and family counsellors caution that the decline in cases is not necessarily a decline in violence.The numbersIn 2024, India recorded, on average, 50 cases of crime against women every hour. Crime rate – or cases per 100,000 women – fell from 66.4 in 2022 to 64.6 in 2024. Overall, cases of crime against women fell 1.5% compared to 2023, and domestic violence cases fell 10%, the data show.“I am not surprised if FIRs [first information reports] have reduced; the policy aims for that,” said Sonali Kusum, assistant professor at the School of Law, Rights and Constitutional Governance at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Women do not want to send their husbands to jail, especially when financially dependent and unable to support their children.“Many women who approach the legal system want the police or Protection Officers to issue warnings to their husbands to change their behaviour,” she explained. Protection Officers are quasi-judicial staff who serve as the interface between the legal institutions and the victims/survivors. “Sometimes, they want judicial separation or protection order under the Domestic Violence Act and not divorce. Matters escalate to criminal charges on a case by case basis, depending upon what the victims want,” she added.“Cases are not reported or escalated, and intervention is not sought till the beating becomes life-threatening for women,” says Vibhuti Patel, social researcher and activist who has taught at SNDT Women’s University and TISS Mumbai.Even when the women come forward, most cases are dismissed as “family affairs” at the level of the complaint, explains Audrey D’mello, advocate and director at the Mumbai-based Majlis Legal Centre, which provides legal and social support to women and children facing sexual and domestic violence. “And many potential domestic violence complaints don’t get investigated by converting to FIR level.”Shiyu Yuan, a researcher at the King’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, warns that crime data might be influenced by access, awareness and stigma and even willingness to report. Attitudinal data can help “show whether the underlying norms that tolerate or justify gendered control are actually changing”, she explained.Regressive attitudes persistA 2025 survey across 29 countries, which included 23,268 Indians over the age of 18, found that many people support gender equality in general terms, while feeling more uneasy when it affects concrete areas such as marriage, family authority and domestic responsibilities. The survey was conducted by Yuan’s institute at King’s College, London, in partnership with Ipsos.The sample is a slice of India’s urban population across socioeconomic classes in metros and small towns, and the data are weighted so that the sample “best reflects the demographic profile of the adult population according to the most recent census data”, the methodology states.“What stands out in the India data is the coexistence of strong support for gender equality and strong concern that equality may have ‘gone too far’,” says Yuan. India is also among the countries most likely to express what people might call “equality anxiety”.