The study presented in this SpringerBrief uses GIS tools to analyze incidents of violence against women in West Bengal India, identifying “hotspots” and offering tools and strategies to predict and prevent future violence. The aim of this study is to understand the existing scenarios and the complex crime patterns committed against women in West Bengal, using advanced GIS tools to map and understand the underlying socio-economic and physical environmental contexts of specific crime events, and critically discussed emerging criminogenic issues on the basis of theoretical understanding and immediate situations.

This study evaluates the effectiveness of existing legislative measures to extract the gaps that exist between policy formulation and execution and effectively applied statistical methods and GIS technologies to visualize the future potential crime areas so that possible measures might be taken. The study considers four categories of violence perpetrated on women: human trafficking, acid attacks, rape and sexual harassment. Each chapter follows a self-contained design to address the study objectives as each crime follows distinct crime pattern, differentially affects the targets and increase risk of victimization and differential key factors are responsible for specific crime occurrences.