As outrage grows over cases of sexual violence in India, activists are demanding a shift from controlling women to confronting men's behaviour. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.

The Jamui and Delhi incidents

Last week, two particularly enraging incidents captured national attention. First, a video showing a group of men accused of harassing and molesting two teenagers at night in Bihar's Jamui went viral. Then, a 17-year-old, out with a friend in Delhi, was allegedly gang-raped in a park by men posing as police. Afterward, women in Bihar told Outlook how the incident in Jamui triggers greater controls and pressure on them. In Delhi, authorities curbed access to public parks and a premier women's college, Lady Shri Ram College (LSR), briefly moved classes online.

The burden placed on women

Writing as an Indian woman, author Niha Masih says she often feels herself oscillating between states of anxiety or anger. The anxiety is about doing the mental maths of how to stay safe – thinking about what she is wearing, where she is going and how she will get there. The anger is at the sheer absurdity of this, and the stories of sexual violence and harassment she reads about every day.

Masih has noticed this pattern repeatedly: after incidents of sexual violence go viral on social media, the fallout further ensnares women. They are the ones who get told to avoid certain places, regulate their behaviour, dress modestly or be home earlier, thereby placing the burden of escaping this menace on them. Feminist activist Kavita Krishnan has described this phenomenon as "perhaps the most widespread form of gender-based violence in India".

What experts say

Instead of figuring out why sexual violence remains entrenched in society, how patriarchal agency perpetuates such violence or what kind of social conditioning is needed for men, women are instead expected to take up less public space. (It is another matter that women might not be safe even inside their own homes.)

Regulating women is easy because "it does not require any institutional cost and, most of all, it sends the signal to concerned parents that the problem is being handled", says Meena Kandasamy, a feminist author whose latest novel, Fieldwork As a Sex Object, is about a woman's life being upturned when a deepfake video using her face goes viral. "Their target audience is not the young women who feel unsafe but the rest of society."

In Masih's experience, this repression happens at three levels: first in the realm of family, then in broader society, and ultimately by the state. It begins at home, under the guise of protection, with arbitrary curfews or dress codes. It gets reinforced at a community level with institutions and social groups through moral policing, victim-blaming and the expectation that women should not put themselves in "unsafe" situations.

The response of the state

Restricting access to parks after sunset can surely reduce the number of people in those places, but it does not address why women are unsafe there. Harassment and sexual violence are, unfortunately, not tied to timings or daylight. And further restricting women's lives is not the solution to injustices foisted on them. All three levels, Kandasamy says, consider women as a "problem to be handled".

"She's not a citizen (for the state), a member (for the community), or an adult (for the family). She is treated like an inanimate but precious object – like a diamond that has to be locked up to prevent theft," she said.

Women are pushing back

Women, however, are pushing back against this approach. In recent days, students from Delhi University have come out on the streets demanding safer public spaces including more street lighting, usable public toilets, more housing and scholarships for female students. Vedayana, 20, a student at Lady Shri Ram College (LSR), says locking up parks is not the solution: "If you are not putting up safety measures to make it accessible to women, then it is as good as saying that the park is only for men."

The scale of the issue

The scale of the issue is devastatingly clear. A recently published survey of more than 4,000 women in New Delhi and Bengaluru found that 65% of women in New Delhi and 29% in Bengaluru experienced harassment in public spaces in the past year.

Another 2024 study from India and Pakistan found that women's overall mobility remains abysmally low, and what freedom they do have is almost entirely tied to education, employment or unpaid care work. Substantive mobility for leisure or pleasure is practically nonexistent.

The political response

Despite how widespread and urgent the problem is, the political response can further shake public confidence. A female minister from Bihar, commenting on the molestation video, said: "Moral policing can be done in a more decent and elegant fashion." Another minister from the state drew fire for describing it as an "isolated" incident.

Minimising crimes against women reflects a political culture in which accountability becomes optional. Students such as Vedayana want this to change. Political parties, she tells me, should pledge to not give tickets or positions to anyone accused of sexual harassment. "We don't want the leaders sitting at the top to perpetrate and preach rape culture," she adds.

Parliament is not immune to accusations, either: the BJP politician Brij Bhushan Singh, who formerly headed the Wrestling Federation of India, was recently accused of sexual harassment by six female wrestlers – he denies the allegations, and was acquitted by a magistrate, in a case that is undergoing appeal. According to an analysis of 2024 parliamentarians by the Association for Democratic Reforms...