Gender, Law Enforcement, and Access to Justice: Evidence from India

CASI Seminar

in partnership with South Asia Center and Penn's Comparative Politics Workshop

Nirvikar Jassal
Postdoctoral Fellow, King Center on Global Development, Stanford University
A Virtual CASI Seminar via Zoom — 12 Noon EDT | 9:30pm IST

About the Seminar:
A number of nations have instituted group-specific institutions as a mechanism to empower vulnerable groups. An assumption underpinning such bodies is that segregation of minority administrators will better serve the interests of in-groups. For instance, in specialized police stations or courts for women, citizens will be more likely to access justice in spaces removed from bias. Jassal uses the creation of women-only police stations in India to test whether such institutions do in fact assist victims of sexual violence or female administrators working within the police bureaucracy. He finds that "representation as separation" may be associated with certain unintended consequences.

About the Speaker:
Nirvikar Jassal is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the King Center on Global Development, Stanford University. His research focuses on gender, sexual violence, ethnic conflict and hate crime, and policing with a regional focus on South Asia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review and Asian Survey. He completed his Ph.D. from the University of California—Berkeley in 2020, and previously worked at the Council on Foreign Relations and New York City government.

The Nand & Jeet Khemka Distinguished Lecture Series is an endowed public program of the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI). Launched in the 2007-08 academic year, and made possible through the generous support of the Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation, the series brings renowned India specialists to the Penn community and serves as a critical forum for analyzing and understanding the complex economic, political, social, and cultural changes that the world’s largest democracy is experiencing, as well as the challenges that lie ahead.
The Saluja Global Fellows Program has been made possible by the generous gift from Vishal Saluja ENG’89 W’89. CASI was excited to launch the program during the 2022–23 academic year, coinciding with the Center’s 30th Anniversary. This new program enables CASI to invite eminent leaders and rising experts on contemporary India preferably from the fields of media, culture, law, and contemporary history to be in residence for one to two weeks at CASI.