The astonishing disparity in the number of deaths of Indian women caused by assaults was published in a report by online journal BMJ Global Health.
A recent study by BMJ Global Health revealed that women in India are 40 times more likely to die than their US counterparts after an assault.
“While both males and females in India had higher odds of mortality than their US counterparts, Indian female assault patients had 40 times higher odds of death than US females,” the report said.
Surprisingly, the death rate is higher in spite of the fact that the Indian group of females in the data were at least twenty years younger than the US women in the research database. According to the findings, “Additionally, while the Indian cohort was on average about two decades younger than the US cohort, they had higher mortality.”
The massive difference in the rate of death has raised several questions; not all of them could find an answer in the research. The report asked whether the increased death rate was due to any delay between injury time and medical attention, which may also be due to insufficient medical facilities like hospitals.
Several causes of trauma were analyzed during the study and the database of the assault patients was collected from the years 2013, 2014, and 2015. Trauma databases included fall, motor vehicle collision (MVC) and assault. In total, 10,089 and 14,144 patients were studied from databases related to India and the US, respectively. From India, data was collected from three largest megacities – Kolkata, Mumbai and Delhi. And from the US the database was gathered from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The database did not include patients of railway and burn injuries.
As for the comparison by specific causes of death, the study found, “Indian females had over 7 times the odds of dying after falls, 5 times the odds of dying for MVC and 40 times the odds of dying after assaults when compared with US females.”
The study also concluded that both males and females from India have higher chances of deaths caused by injuries from similar situations as of their counterparts from the US. “Males and females in the higher-income country (USA) usually have five to seven times lower odds of mortality than their similarly injured counterparts in a lower-income country (India) for falls and motor vehicle collisions,” according to the study.