A few days ago, Soumya Vishwanathan’s remembrance was printed in a newspaper. Her family does so every year; a memory of a life well-lived, but also a rude reminder of a life cruelly cut short. For those who aren’t familiar, Soumya, a 28-year-old television journalist, was shot in cold blood by hoodlums while returning home from a late-night work shift. This was 2008, and I remember the shock and horror that all of us women journalists felt at the time. We always thought the capital was unsafe, but this blatant act of violence seemed too inscrutable to explain. Some of our friends knew Soumya, some had worked with her, and all raved about her — her end made no sense at all. 18 years on, so little has changed. Women in India continue to fall victim to mindless crimes and acts of violence, and there’s no stopping the perpetrators.
On September 21, a 17-year-old minor girl was gang-raped by three men in a park near Kalkaji Mandir in south Delhi, just a couple of kilometres away from the Kalkaji police station. The victim and her male friend were sitting in the park when the rapists, posing as policemen, thrashed and restrained the male friend and went on to brutally rape the girl in the secluded park. I know that locale well, having spent almost three years living right around the corner. My time there coincided with Soumya’s murder; it’s surreal that both dastardly incidents seem so different and yet so connected. Even back then, the entire area was almost always pitch-black and isolated. Even the road in front of the police station was barely lit. A lack of streetlights has been a niggling issue in Delhi. As per news reports, a safety audit revealed that 33 per cent of 1,525 streetlights in south-east Delhi don’t work!
The response from law enforcement has been swift — culprits caught within 12 hours, an audit of 300 parks, deployment of bike patrols, repair of damaged boundary walls, and installation of more CCTVs. The Delhi Development Authority (DDA) proposed restricted entry into parks, curfews, and other directives advising women to keep to well-lit areas. And with that, once again, the burden of staying safe is placed right back on women. A few weeks before the Kalkaji rape, another 17-year-old girl was raped and murdered in Swaroop Nagar, also in Delhi. In the same month, there were reported rapes of another 6-year-old, 11-year-old, and 16-year-old.
As per the latest data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), India recorded more than 4.41 lakh cases of crimes against women in 2024. Of these, 29,536 were rape cases; these are reported numbers, and the unreported ones could be many more. A woman is raped in India every 18 minutes! In yet another alarming finding, it’s also now known that rape cases involving female minors have quadrupled, even though conviction has remained abysmal. In 2015, there were 10,934 girl victims below the age of 18; by 2024, that number had skyrocketed to 43,675. As per reports, 3 lakh girl children were sexually abused in five years.
It’s true that women are deemed to be more secure in some cities than others, but then you have a rape inside a hospital in Kolkata, or a teen molestation video emanates from Jamui, or a gang rape happens in Begusarai (both in Bihar), or reports of a campus sexual assault case surface at a university in Punjab, or a 90-year-old woman is gang-raped in Madhya Pradesh. The administration’s reaction to lock up, restrict and restrain, sequester and cloak women is now turning old. Because it’s not just about surveillance and lighting up streets. There’s a deeper rot that runs through the veins of our society, where violence against women has become normalised, and nobody is addressing that. This violence is aimed at stupefying, suppressing and trampling over women’s agency, perpetrated by little men who can’t stomach their social and financial independence. Ultimately, rapes, sexual assaults, and violence are often less about sexual deviance and more about quelling the spirit of women. So, teach the men about consent and boundaries, educate them about women’s empowerment, put curfews on them, and let penal action be swift, harsh, and public. Only then, maybe, some things will change.
For now, the student protests that are reverberating across the national capital feel quite déjà vu. Remember Nirbhaya? The frustration, the hopelessness, the agony of consistently demanding safe public spaces for ourselves is tiring. We have seen it earlier, we have done it earlier, and we are still at it. The most basic freedoms of life and movement continue to be unobtainable manna from heaven for women. We try to reclaim public spaces, we try to express ourselves and live our best lives, but it takes one such barbaric incident of violence to steal our liberty. Our society, our governments, and our male allies are letting this happen over and over again. And women continue to go back and forth like ping-pong balls, once free and then chained again — and thus the sordid cycle continues.
Views expressed are personal