A teenage girl goes to a temple in Delhi.
A 16-year-old goes to a coaching class in Gwalior.
A schoolgirl in Bihar is allegedly stopped on the road.
In all three cases, the allegations are different. The circumstances are different. The accused are different.
But they have arrived in the news within days of each other, bringing back a question India has been asking for years:
How much longer will women have to live with this?
In Delhi, a teenage girl who had gone to Kalkaji Mandir with a male friend was allegedly sexually assaulted in a nearby park by three men who posed as policemen. The men allegedly separated her from her friend and threatened them before the assault. Police have arrested the accused as the investigation continues.
In Gwalior, a 16-year-old girl has alleged that a 17-year-old neighbour who had been stalking and harassing her for months threatened to make private photographs and chats public before taking her to a flat, where she alleged that he raped her.
And in Delhi's Swaroop Nagar earlier this month, a 16-year-old girl was allegedly gang-raped and murdered by four people, including three minors, after she went to meet a boy she knew. All four accused have been taken into custody, police said.
These are three different cases.
But read the conversations that follow cases like these and the questions often sound eerily familiar.
What was she wearing?
Why was she there?
Why was she alone?
Why did she trust him?
Why did she go with him?
Why didn't she fight back?
And, eventually, the question finds its way back to the woman.
Was it her fault?
What Does 263 Million Actually Tell Us?
The World Health Organization has put out a new estimate that is difficult to comprehend: 263 million women and girls aged 15 and above have experienced sexual violence by a man who was not an intimate partner at least once since the age of 15.
That is 8% globally.
But 263 million is not 263 million rape cases. It is an estimate of women and girls who have experienced non-partner sexual violence, a broader category that includes rape, attempted rape, unwanted sexual touching and other forms of sexual violence.
And even that number is likely an underestimate. WHO says stigma, fear of repercussions, gaps in data and differences in the way countries ask about sexual violence all mean that many experiences never make it into the statistics.
India's numbers tell a different story.
The latest NCRB data available nationally records 29,536 rape cases in 2024.
That is roughly 81 registered cases a day.
But these figures should not be placed next to the WHO's 263 million as if they are measuring the same thing. They aren't.
One is a count of rape cases registered with Indian police in a single year.
The other is an estimate of lifetime experience of non-partner sexual violence across the world.
There is no neat Indian equivalent of the 263 million figure that we can simply plug into the headline.
And there is another reason India's number deserves scrutiny: rape is notoriously underreported. A police record can tell us how many cases were registered. It cannot tell us how many people never went to the police.
Still, the NCRB data gives us one detail that is harder to ignore.
In 96.8% of registered rape cases in 2024, the accused was known to the survivor.
So much for the stranger in the dark alley.
The person accused is often already somewhere in the survivor's world.
A neighbour, an acquaintance. a friend, a relative, a partner or someone she trusted.
We have been here before
It has been nearly 14 years since Nirbhaya.
On 16 December 2012, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student was gang-raped and brutally assaulted on a moving bus in Delhi.
She died on 29 December.
The protests that followed were unlike anything India had seen around sexual violence before. The case became a national reckoning. There were questions about policing, public transport, the criminal justice system and what it meant for women to simply move through a city.
The government set up the Justice J.S. Verma Committee.
Its report came in January 2013.
The Criminal Law Amendment Act followed later that year, bringing major changes to the legal framework around sexual offences. Stalking and voyeurism became specific offences. The law was changed to strengthen provisions dealing with sexual violence and to increase accountability around the handling of complaints and survivors.
The four adult men convicted in the Nirbhaya case were eventually executed on 20 March 2020.
Fourteen years later, the law is different.
But listen to how we still talk.
“Rape can only be stopped by women”
That was one of the most striking things to come out of Brut's 2024 street interviews in Delhi.
We asked people why rape happens.
Some said it could be stopped “only and only by girls”. Some blamed women's clothes.
Some said revealing clothes make men lose control. Some said women should dress according to Indian culture.
There were references to alcohol, pornography, Bollywood, social media, public displays of affection.
One person brought up the old “one hand cannot clap” argument.
In other words, the discussion very quickly became about what women were doing.
But there were other voices too.
People spoke about education.
About boys and girls being taught to respect each other.
About equality.
About consent.
And one woman pushed back against the idea that a woman's clothes should determine how she is treated.
That is what makes the conversation interesting.
Not because every person on the street represents what India thinks.
They don't.
But because you can hear, in a few minutes of interviews, two very different ideas about sexual violence.
One says women need to change their behaviour.
The other asks why men are being given reasons for behaviour that is their own responsibility.
A dress is not an invitation
This should not be controversial.
A woman wearing a short dress has not consented to sex.
A woman wearing a saree has not consented to sex.
A woman who is drinking has not consented to sex.
A woman who agrees to a date has not agreed to everything that happens on that date.
Being in a relationship does not mean permanent consent.
And not physically fighting back does not automatically mean consent either. India's current rape law explicitly says that the absence of physical resistance, by itself, does not mean a woman consented to sexual activity.
Yet we keep returning to clothes.
Perhaps because clothes are easier to talk about than entitlement.
It is easier to tell women to cover up than to talk about why someone believes another person's body is available to them.
It is easier to say “don't go there” than to ask why a public place should become unsafe because a woman is there.
It is easier to tell girls to be careful than to teach boys what consent actually means.
And then there is the law
India did change its laws after Nirbhaya.
It changed them again.
The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita came into force in July 2024 and now contains India's principal criminal provisions on rape and other sexual offences. Under Section 64, rape is punishable with a minimum of 10 years' imprisonment, extendable to life imprisonment, subject to the statutory provisions.
The law also provides particularly severe punishment for certain cases involving minors and gang rape.
But there is a limit to what a punishment can do.
A law cannot stand beside a woman when an assault is happening.
It cannot make the road home safer.
It cannot stop someone from stalking her.
It cannot stop someone from threatening to leak her photographs.
It cannot make a person respect a boundary.
It can punish.
It can deter.
It can create consequences.
But prevention has to happen much earlier.
Look at what is happening before the word “rape” appears
The Gwalior case is particularly uncomfortable because the alleged assault did not appear out of nowhere.
According to the girl's complaint, the accused had allegedly been stalking her for nearly a year.
He allegedly followed her to and from coaching.
Then came private photographs and chats.
Then threats.
Then, according to her allegation, the assault.
That sequence matters.
Because sexual violence is not always a single, isolated moment.
Sometimes there is a trail beforehand.
Stalking.
Harassment.
Threats.
Digital coercion.
Control.
The WHO's latest work on sexual violence specifically highlights the need to measure coercion, lack of consent, sexual harassment and technology-facilitated sexual violence, including the non-consensual sharing of intimate images and online rape threats.
We cannot prevent what we refuse to recognise.
We even built a device that bites back
There is a device developed by South African doctor Sonette Ehlers and designed to trap an attacker during forced penetration.
The idea sounds almost unbelievable. A woman wears something inside her body that is designed to hurt or trap the person attacking her.
It is a device born out of an understandable fear.
But look at what it represents.
A woman is attacked.
And the solution we imagine is something she can carry.
Something she can wear.
Something she can use to protect herself.
There is a place for safety tools. Women should have every possible way to protect themselves if they need it.
But a device cannot be the answer to a social problem this large.
Because the real question is not how well a woman can defend herself.
It is why she needs to.
