The recent rape cases in Delhi have shocked us to the core. A woman allegedly gang-raped inside a moving bus in the national capital, a three-year-old child allegedly assaulted within a school environment, repeated reports of sexual violence against minors appearing with such frequency that the country has almost learnt to consume them as routine news. One headline replaces another; one outrage dissolves into the next.
What is terrifying is not merely the brutality of these crimes, but their frequency. After every candle march, every televised debate, every promise of “women’s empowerment” and “zero tolerance”, there is another such crime. Meanwhile, women continue to navigate this society with fear woven into the ordinary rhythm of life; fear while travelling, fear while studying, fear while working, fear while simply existing.
More than a decade after the Nirbhaya case forced the Indian State to promise sweeping reforms, another woman is allegedly assaulted, in the same way, inside a moving bus in Delhi. Children continue to face violence even within institutions meant to protect them. This repetition is not accidental. It reflects a deeper crisis of governance, institutional decay and social indifference that no amount of political rhetoric can conceal.
Yet, at the very same time, we are constantly shown figures supposedly demonstrating rising women’s workforce participation, expanding inclusion and women-led development. We celebrate statistical improvements produced through changing definitions and measurement practices that increasingly classify precarious, unpaid and subsidiary labour as employment. Whereas the plain truth is that no society can meaningfully claim women’s empowerment while simultaneously failing to punish violence against women.
The crisis becomes even more disturbing when one examines the gap between reported crimes and actual punishment. India reports tens of thousands of rape cases every year, yet conviction rates have historically remained shockingly low. In many years, more than 70% of accused persons effectively escape conviction. Behind these numbers lies an entire machinery of institutional failure; delayed investigations, hostile policing, endless judicial pendency, intimidation of survivors, social pressure to withdraw complaints and the crushing psychological violence of navigating courts for years.
Figure 1: Reported Rape Cases and Approximate Convictions in India, 2004–2023
These figures shame the nation. For two decades, India has witnessed persistently high levels of sexual violence while conviction rates remain abysmally low. The issue, therefore, is not merely that a crime occurs, but that the criminal justice system repeatedly fails to punish it swiftly and credibly. A State that cannot guarantee women safety, dignity and justice cannot meaningfully claim to empower them, regardless of how many times it redefines inclusion statistically.
The deeper problem lies in the nature of governance itself. Women’s safety has increasingly been reduced to spectacle; CCTV announcements, symbolic legislation, carefully staged outrage and periodic policing drives after horrific incidents. But safety cannot be manufactured through spectacle after violence has already taken place. It requires functioning public institutions before violence occurs; safe public transport, accountable policing, strong forensic systems, accessible legal aid, dignified employment, social security and judicial systems capable of delivering swift punishment.
Instead, what we increasingly witness is the coexistence of statistical celebration and lived insecurity. Governments speak the language of women-led development while women continue to disappear from public spaces after dark out of fear. We are told that participation is rising while insecurity itself functions as an invisible tax on every woman’s mobility, education and labour force participation.
The burden of this insecurity is not experienced equally. Women rendered more vulnerable because of socio-economic location face disproportionately greater challenges. The privileged can partially privatise safety through gated housing, private vehicles and expensive institutions. The poor cannot. Their insecurity becomes normalised within everyday urban life.
Equally horrifying is the growing violence against children. The repeated reports of sexual assault against minors reveal not merely individual criminality but the collapse of institutional responsibility itself. A society that cannot protect children even within schools and supervised environments cannot claim to possess functioning governance structures.
The category “crimes against children” includes both male and female minors, and the larger reality is that violence in unequal societies invariably falls most heavily upon the vulnerable. Boys under 18 are often no less vulnerable to abuse, exploitation and institutional abandonment than girls. Yet a substantial proportion of sexual offences under POCSO (Protection of Children from Sexual Offence) Act and related laws continue to target girl children, exposing the deeply gendered nature of violence within a broader landscape of social vulnerability and institutional failure.
The explosion in crimes against children reveals a society undergoing a deeper moral and institutional breakdown. The rise from roughly 18,700 reported crimes against children in 2005 to nearly 1.87 lakh cases by 2024 cannot be dismissed merely as improved reporting. Even where reporting has improved, the inability of institutions to deliver swift justice, prevent abuse and protect children within homes, schools and neighbourhoods points toward a profound collapse of governance.
More disturbingly, even the apparent rise in convictions does not necessarily indicate timely justice. Much of India’s child-protection system remains paralysed by enormous pendency under POCSO courts, delayed investigations and years-long trials. The consequence is that legal processes themselves increasingly become another form of violence inflicted upon survivors and their families.
Source: Author’s compilation using NCRB Crime in India reports, CRY/NCRB analysis and NCRB-linked reporting. Approximate convictions are indicative and derived from reported conviction-rate trends.
Ultimately, the crisis of women’s safety in India is not merely a question of crime. It is a question of what kind of society and state we are becoming. No economy can meaningfully bring women into public and productive life while simultaneously allowing fear, impunity and institutional indifference to govern everyday existence. Regardless of how many statistical categories are revised or definitions expanded, a society that cannot guarantee women safety, dignity and justice cannot meaningfully claim progress.
The writer is Associate Professor at Zakir Husain Delhi College, University of Delhi. The views are personal.
‘I Exist, Therefore I Think’: Rethinking Bodily Autonomy Beyond Statutory Clock
The SC bench has shifted focus from gestational limits to constitutional guarantees and lasting social consequences, and allowed termination of pregnancy of a minor rape survivor.
In a deeply consequential challenge before the Supreme Court, a case arose from a plea by the mother of a minor rape survivor seeking the court’s discretion to terminate a pregnancy that had advanced to 27 weeks. The Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 2021, Section 3 (2) operates with a clinical finality, posing a statutory bar at termination of pregnancy post the gestational period after 24 weeks, even in cases involving vulnerable categories.
Faced with statutory literalism over bodily autonomy, Justice B.V Nagarathna and Justice Ujjal Bhuyan foregrounded the minor’s autonomy. The bench shifted the focus from the gestational limits to constitutional guarantees and lasting social consequences, and allowed termination of pregnancy of the minor survivor.
In a week, a curative petition was filed at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences' instance, seeking to revisit the precedent and effectively pleading with the court to retreat into statutory conservatism. The plea was dismissed by a bench led by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi. In a candid observation, the apex court asked the Union to amend the law, especially for rape survivors.
It is unassailable to say that in several instances, the courts have affirmed the simple proposition that bodily autonomy cannot be subordinate to the rigid timelines of the statute. Although judicial clarity on the issue is concretised, it sits alongside stubborn legislative silence, and the burden quietly falls to those least equipped to bear it.
The medical practitioners remain bound by statutory prohibitions and penal consequences, which dull clinical judgment once the statutory limitation is triggered. Consequently, the right that has been emphatically recognised in constitutional jurisprudence remains procedurally elusive.
For a survivor, the right to bodily autonomy ceases to be an exercise of choice and is reduced to a question of access to litigation. It is particularly striking when the relief sought is inherently time-sensitive, as each passing day narrows the window for safe medical intervention.
Adding to the plight, a petition for the termination of pregnancy after the statutory limitation requires approaching a constitutional court. For survivors from the marginalised sections of society or rural areas, the distance is not merely physical but systemic, involving costs, delay and a legal labyrinth that is difficult to navigate.
The process is particularly fraught since it involves a human cost. To seek relief, the rape survivor has to relive the trauma in an adversarial setting. Followed by a contingency upon judicial discretion or intensifying the sense of vulnerability. For instance, in a petition before the Gujarat High Court in 2023, a plea by a minor rape survivor seeking termination at 29 weeks. Justice Samir J Dave invoked the historical normalisation of early marriage and childbirth, referring to the Manusmriti text:
Because we are living in the 21st century, ask your mother or great-grandmother, 14-15 was the maximum age (for getting married). The child used to take birth before the age of 17. Girls get matured before boys. 4-5 months here and there doesn’t make a difference. You will not read it, but do read Manusmruti once for this.
In the same case, Justice Dave inquired whether there was a ‘chance of compromise’ between the rape survivor and the accused, for it may “save three lives”. These observations, even if made in a passing remark, ostensibly put the precarious terrain on which the rape survivor is left to assert their rights. Even if constitutionally ordained and judicially interpreted, the interpretive subjectivity risks diluting the law's clarity.
Rape is not a crime of lust or desire; it is a crime of assertion of power, over the body and over an individual’s autonomy. From a materialist perspective, such violence is embedded within broader hierarchies of inequality, where control over the body mirrors control over agency itself. When law, through rigid timelines or procedural barriers, compels a survivor to carry forward the consequences of that violence. The survivor is left with a Hobson’s choice: either seek termination through unauthorised channels, significantly contributing to maternal mortality, or endure the physical, psychological, and social burden of carrying a pregnancy born of violence to term.
French philosopher René Descartes located certainty in the act of thinking, proposing that existence is secured through doubt and reason: Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum, translating to ‘I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.’ Centuries later, French thinker and philosopher Jean Paul Sartre rejected the formulation and argued that existence precedes essence, that we are thrust into the world as living, embodied, and sentient beings, and only thereafter acquire the capacity to think, choose, and create meaning.
It is Sartre’s insight that can potentially guide constitutional reasoning in law, particularly in cases involving the termination of pregnancy arising from rape, where the law is confronted not with abstraction but with a living person bearing trauma within her own body. Consciousness here is not detached but rooted in sentient existence, in the capacity to feel, suffer, and endure. Thought does not precede this condition; it is that one exists, therefore it thinks. One exists first as a sentient, breathing, rights-bearing being, and it is from this embodied existence that autonomy, choice, and the capacity to make meaning shall be recognised and protected.
The writer is an Advocate in Delhi High Court. The views are personal.
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