Straight Talk | India Cannot Protect Women From Rape By Making Their World Smaller

Sanbeer Singh Ranhotra

India has spent years telling women how to avoid rape. It's time to spend those years teaching men & boys why they must never commit it & why those around them must never excuse it

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Sunset in Delhi now comes with a policy. After dark, parks with many gates will let people in through only a few. The rule arrived days after a 17-year-old was gang-raped in one of those parks by three men who, the police say, posed as cops. In Bihar around the same time, a minister was busy explaining that the molestation of a schoolgirl was an isolated incident. India’s crisis is that no one appears to have consulted the women. Women have started to experience the State as a warden. Wardens issue curfews and nobody really likes them.

Nobody needs to be told what happens next. There are marches, placards, a hashtag with a short life and a week of studio panels. Then everyone goes home, because life is long and outrage is tiring. The girl in that park was three or four years old when the country lit candles for Nirbhaya and swore never again. In the 14 years since, the law has been toughened repeatedly. It now allows death as a sentence for the gang rape of anyone under 18. This time, the victim was 17. The harshest punishment on the books was sitting right there, and the men went ahead anyway.

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The reason has to do with who India chooses to talk to. Every safety message this country produces has a woman at the receiving end. Be home........

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