SPECIAL ARTICLE Crime against Women and Children in Delhi Analysis of Secondary and Empirical Data SHIVANI SATIJA, AMRITA DATTA This paper analyses crime against women and children in Delhi based on two data sources, the National Crime Records Bureau and an empirical data set of the Perceptions Survey of the Delhi Human Development Report, 2013. Using the NCRB data, the paper analyses trends in the rate and composition of crime against women and children from 2004-2006 to 2010-2012, including charge sheets and convictions. Results from the Perceptions Survey highlight the spatial nature of crime in the state, the differential experience of crime by social groups, as well as men and women. A key finding is the high vulnerability of children to crime in the city. What emerges from the comparison of secondary and primary data is the simultaneous existence of incidence of crime on the one hand and perception of crime and violence on the other. A combination of various data sources is important to capture both incidence and perception in order to gain a more holistic and in-depth understanding of crime and violence, a vastly under-researched topic in the social sciences. We would like to thank Amitabh Kundu, Uday Sahay, Alakh Sharma, Kalpana Viswanath and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. We are also grateful for suggestions and comments of participants of a consultation held in June 2013 to discuss some of the findings reported in this paper. Shivani Satija (shivani. satija2014@tiss.edu) is with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai; and Amrita Datta (datta.amrita@gmail.com) is with the Institute for Human Development, New Delhi and International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. 1 Introduction D elhi is increasingly being perceived as the most unsafe city in India. The brutal gang rape of a medical student there on 16 December 2012 brought the issue of women's safety and security, and that of crime against women, in the forefront of public discourse (Philipose 2013). Newspaper and television reports point towards a trend of increasing crimes against women and children (Perappadan 2014), and emphasise the lack of safety in public spaces in the city. Despite being a vital component of human development, violence and crime remain an under-researched issue, and one of the key reasons for this is the paucity of reliable and rele- vant data (Dreze and Khera 2000). The paper attempts to locate crime against women and children in particular within the context of overall crimes in Delhi, using both secondary and primary data sources. The first part examines data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) from 2004 to 2006 and from 2010 to 2012, and studies trends in, first, the overall crime rate in Delhi vis-Ă -vis other major cities in the country and the composition of crime within Delhi in this period; and second, the rate of crime against women and children in Delhi vis-Ă -vis other major cit- ies, and the composition of crime against women and chil- dren in Delhi