Every few months, a case shatters the national conscience. In December 2012 it was a young physiotherapy student on a Delhi bus. In August 2024 it was a trainee doctor at a Kolkata hospital, and in the same month two nursery girls in Badlapur, Maharashtra. Candles are lit, television debates rage, laws are tightened, and within weeks the country moves on.
Then the next case arrives.
This pattern is the real story. India does not lack outrage or legislation. What it lacks is a change in the everyday beliefs that make sexual violence easy to commit, easy to excuse and hard to punish.
What the numbers say, and what they hide?
The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) is the government’s own record keeper. Its latest full report covers 2023. It shows about 29,670 registered rape cases that year. That works out to a rape rate of 4.4 per lakh population.
Here I need to be honest with you. For adult women, the registered figure has stayed roughly in the range of 30,000 a year for several years. It is not exploding. Anyone who says otherwise is not reading the data carefully, and the argument in this article does not need exaggeration.
The trend is different for children. Crimes against children rose from 1,49,404 in 2021 to 1,62,449 in 2022 and then to 1,77,335 in 2023, a 9.2% jump in the last year. Sexual offences against children numbered 70,053 in 2023, which is about 192 every day. Overall crimes against children have grown nearly tenfold since 2005, when 18,700 cases were recorded.
Look closer at the child cases. There were 40,434 cases of penetrative sexual assault on children in 2023. In 39,076 of them, the offender was someone the child knew, and in 3,224 cases the offender was a family member. The same report links 89 child murders to rape or sexual offences law.
This tells us that the “stranger in a dark alley” is largely a myth. The danger sits in homes, neighbourhoods, schools and relatives’ houses. And that is exactly where our culture teaches children and families to stay quiet.
Are cases rising, or is reporting rising?
Both may be true. Some of the rise in child cases reflects a stronger law (the POCSO Act of 2012) and more willingness to file complaints. Researchers who study these numbers say a higher count does not automatically mean a more hostile society. But consider the other side. If about 30,000 rapes reach a police officer register in a country of over 140 crore people, the real number is almost certainly far larger. Survey data on women who report experiencing sexual violence points to millions of women, not thousands. The gap between what happens and what is recorded is the silence that rape culture builds.
The justice numbers
Registering a case is only the first step. In 2023, about 2.03 lakh rape cases were pending trial in courts, and convictions came in only 4,464 of them, a conviction rate of 22.7 percent. In plain terms, roughly three out of four completed trials end without a conviction. For child sexual offences, over 5.9 lakh trials were pending.
Why does this happen? Police officers in Karnataka told journalists that many parents settle matters out of court because the case involves a child and they do not want to drag it on. The same report notes that the law requires POCSO trials to finish within a year, but this is hardly followed.
Read that again. Families settle with the accused because the system is slow, the shame is heavy and the child pays the price for a public trial. The offender, meanwhile, learns that the risk is low.
Who gets blamed: the woman’s clothes, or the woman’s clock?
Now turn to what happens after a woman is attacked. The first questions asked are rarely about the attacker. What was she wearing? Why was she out at that hour? Who was she with? Why did she not scream?
Every one of these questions quietly moves the responsibility from the person who committed the crime to the person who survived it.
Consider what the evidence says. Rape happens to toddlers in frocks, to women in sarees and salwar suits, to girls in school uniforms, to women in burqas, and to women in their own bedrooms. If clothing caused rape, these cases would not exist. The child cases above are the strongest answer to the dress argument. An eight-month-old baby does not “provoke” anyone.
Timing follows the same logic. We tell women to be home before dark, as if the home were safe. But the data shows the offender is known to the victim in the great majority of cases. The curfew does not protect women from the person most likely to harm them. It only shrinks women’s lives.
This is what I mean by gaslighting. A woman is told that her freedom is the problem. She is made to doubt her own judgment, to feel that if she had dressed differently or returned earlier, it would not have happened. She then carries guilt for a crime committed against her. Some families internalise this so deeply that they stop the girl’s education, marry her early or keep her inside.
Public figures have said these things aloud. In a well-known 2015 documentary on the Delhi case, the defence lawyers spoke openly about women being like flowers to be protected or objects to be kept safe. That is not fringe thinking. It is the same idea, said without embarrassment.
Nobody tells the boys, but why?
Now look at the other side of the picture. Where is the message aimed at men?
Most Indian boys grow up hearing a long list of things girls must do. Sit properly, cover up, speak softly, return early, tolerate. What they rarely hear is a plain sentence: you must never touch another person without their clear agreement, and “no” means stop.
Instead, many boys learn the opposite from the world around them. Films present stalking as romance, where a woman’s refusal is only the first step in a chase. Eve teasing is laughed off as “boys will be boys”. A boy who harasses is seen as naughty. A girl who complains is seen as trouble. Sex is not discussed at home or at school, so young people learn about it from pornography and from friends who know no more than they do.
The result is a generation of boys who have been trained to see women as prizes to be won or property to be guarded, and never as equals whose “no” carries weight. A society cannot ask women to change their behaviour and then act surprised when the behaviour of men stays the same.
The fix is not complicated to describe. Teach boys, at home and in schools, that consent is a basic rule of human behaviour. Teach them that a man who respects a woman’s boundaries loses nothing. And have fathers, uncles, teachers and sports coaches say it out loud. Boys copy what adults do far more than what adults say.
Tradition, privacy and consent
This is the deepest layer, and the one people are most reluctant to discuss.
In many Indian families, the individual barely exists as a separate person. A child’s body, choices, marriage and career belong to the family. A daughter’s virginity is called the family’s “izzat”, its honour. A wife’s body is expected to be available to her husband. A young person who asks for privacy is often treated as hiding something. A closed door invites suspicion.
When privacy is not respected, consent has no room to grow. If a child learns that no one asks before touching her, hugging her, deciding her future and choosing her spouse, she does not learn that her body is hers. And a boy raised the same way does not learn to ask.
This shows up in several places:
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Children. Many families teach children to obey any elder without question. An uncle or tutor who abuses a child can rely on that obedience and on the family’s fear of shame.
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Marriage. Indian law still carries an exception saying that sex by a husband with a wife above the age of 18 is not rape. The same idea moved from the old Penal Code into the new Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita of 2023. Marriage, in law and in tradition, is treated as permanent consent.
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Honour. A rape victim is often said to have “lost her honour”, as though she did something wrong. The idea that shame belongs to the victim and not to the attacker pushes families toward silence, compromise and even marriage of the survivor to the accused.
This is not an argument against Indian “culture”. India has also given the world traditions of respect for women, strong female figures and reform movements led by both women and men. The point is narrower. Certain inherited habits, especially the ideas that family honour lives in women’s bodies and that individual privacy is selfish, make it very hard for a victim to speak and for a society to listen.
The legal view
Indian law has moved a long way, and it deserves credit for that. After the 2012 Delhi case, the Justice Verma Committee reviewed the law, and Parliament passed the 2013 amendments. Stalking, voyeurism and acid attacks became clear offences. The definition of rape widened. The law now says consent must be a clear and voluntary agreement. The POCSO Act of 2012 created a special child protection law with child friendly procedures. In 2017 the Supreme Court recognised privacy as a fundamental right, and in 2018 it struck down the criminalisation of adultery and of consensual adult same sex relations, moves that treated adults as owners of their own choices.
Yet the law in the books and the law in the street are different things.
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Delays. As shown above, lakhs of cases are pending, and the one-year limit for POCSO trials is often ignored.
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Police behaviour. Women still report being turned away, told to “compromise”, or questioned about their character. Many stations lack women officers.
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Invasive practices. The Supreme Court banned the so called two finger test years ago because it is degrading and unscientific. Reports of its use still surface.
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Marital rape. As noted, the law still shields husbands, and the matter remains unresolved in the courts.
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Uneven justice. The Bilkis Bano case showed how fragile accountability can be. Convicts in a gang rape and mass murder case were released early in 2022 and welcomed with garlands in some quarters, and the Supreme Court later cancelled the release in 2024.
A stricter law does not help if the court is slow and the police officer is unsympathetic. Harsher punishment, including the death penalty for child rape introduced in 2018, has not reduced the cases. Research in many countries suggests that the certainty of getting caught deters crime far more than the severity of the sentence. Right now, with a conviction rate of 22.7 percent, an offender’s chance of being caught and convicted is low.
The psychological view
Why do so many people, including well educated ones, blame the victim? Psychologists offer some simple explanations.
The “just world” belief. Most of us want to believe that bad things happen to people who did something wrong, because it makes the world feel safe. If a woman was raped, we look for what she did wrong, because otherwise we would have to accept that it could happen to anyone, including us or our daughters. Blaming her is a way of calming our own fear.
Power, not desire. Researchers who study offenders repeatedly find that sexual violence is mostly about control and entitlement, not uncontrollable lust. A man who believes he is owed access to a woman’s body, and who sees her refusal as an insult, is more likely to force himself on her. That is why child rape and the rape of elderly women happen. Desire does not explain them. Power does.
Learning by watching. Children absorb behaviour from what they see. A boy who watches his father shout at his mother, or his friends mock a girl on the street, learns that this is normal male behaviour. A girl who watches her mother silently accept everything learns to expect the same.
The bystander effect. In a crowd, each person waits for someone else to step in. Many harassment incidents on buses and streets happen with plenty of onlookers. Silence protects the offender.
Trauma and silence. Survivors, especially children, often blame themselves. When the adults around them also blame or hush them, the harm multiplies. Many carry it for decades without telling anyone.
The sociological view
Sociologists look at how society is arranged. Three ideas are useful, and none needs a textbook.
Patriarchy. This just means a system where men hold most of the power and decisions, at home, at work and in public life. When power is unequal, it is easy for the stronger side to dismiss the weaker side’s complaint. Women’s lower share of property, jobs and public positions makes them more dependent on family approval, and so more likely to stay quiet.
Norms and enforcement. Every society has unwritten rules about what is acceptable. In India, these rules have long been policed against women (do not stay out late, do not argue) rather than against men (do not harass, do not force). The society enforces obedience by shaming girls and lets men off with a shrug.
Caste and class. Sexual violence in India is tangled with caste. Dalit and Adivasi women face a much higher risk and have a much harder time getting justice, because the accused is often more powerful locally. The police, the village and sometimes the courts lean toward the powerful. A woman who is poor, from a marginalised caste and living far from a city has the least protection.
Add rapid change to this mix. More women now study, work and travel alone than ever before. That is progress. But it collides with old expectations, and some men respond to women’s growing independence with resentment. The reaction to women’s freedom, dressed up as concern for “safety” or “culture”, is one of the strongest forces holding rape culture in place.
So why will it be so hard to undo?
Because the problem is not a shortage of laws. It is a chain of habits, each of which protects the next.
Families teach silence. Silence lowers reporting. Low reporting hides the true scale. Slow courts and weak conviction rates tell offenders they will likely get away with it. Victim blaming tells women that speaking up costs more than staying quiet. And the absence of any lessons on consent means a fresh group of boys arrives every year with the same beliefs their fathers had.
Each link relies on the others. Pull one, and the rest hold it in place. That is why a single new law or a single fast track court, however welcome, does not break the cycle. It is also why candlelight marches feel powerful for a week and change nothing for a decade.
Being honest about this is not the same as giving up. Societies do change, but usually slowly and on several fronts at once. What would it take?
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Teach consent early. Age-appropriate lessons in schools, starting in primary classes, on body safety, privacy and respect. The reported cases of child abuse make this the most urgent step.
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Speak to boys directly. Campaigns, teachers, sports clubs and parents must address men and boys as the people responsible for stopping sexual violence, not just as protectors of “their” women.
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Fix the courts and police. Meet the one-year limit for child cases, add women officers, train police to record complaints without judgment, and publish the pending numbers every year.
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Recognise marital rape. Remove the exception in the law so that consent means the same thing inside and outside marriage.
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Protect victims from the family’s pressure. Support survivors with counselling, legal aid and safe shelter so that families are not forced to choose between justice and survival.
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Stop blaming the victim, in public and at home. Media, politicians, religious leaders and neighbours all shape the tone. When a public figure mentions a woman’s clothes in a rape case, that person deserves criticism.
Dr. Jaimine Vaishnav is a faculty of geopolitics and world economy and other liberal arts subjects, a researcher with publications in SCI and ABDC journals, and an author of 6 books specializing in informal economies, mass media, and street entrepreneurship. With over a decade of experience as an academic and options trader, he is keen on bridging the grassroots business practices with global economic thought. His work emphasizes resilience, innovation, and human action in everyday human life. He can be contacted on jaiminism@hotmail.co.in for further communication.