A NATION’S FAILURE, WOMEN’S FEAR: CONFRONTING SEXUAL VIOLENCE
The Day A Woman can walk freely on the streets at night, that day we can say India has achieved Independence
Mahatma Gandhi
(By Mahalakshmi Pavani, Senior Advocate Supreme Court)
Violence, mobilized patriarchy and the ineptitude of the State in effectively protecting the rights of women have become a part of the normative fabric of our country.
A country that proudly venerates and celebrates the festival of Goddesses, the commodification and brutalization of women has bequeathed to generations and continues to torment, traumatise and reinforce male hegemony.
Whilst women are left lamenting the demise of social protections, the systemic resistance towards complete erasure of such barbaric perpetrators makes one fact blatantly obvious- when the powerful protect the guilty, silence is no longer neutrality; it is complicity. From infancy to adulthood, women are left oscillating between extremes of anxiety, anger and grief all at the same time, it makes one wonder whether the State has conveniently shirked off its duty of protecting women and has instead taken to imposing their own conceited moralistic standards that shrink their very fundamental rights to redundancy? Or are women now faced with protecting their own selves, in the face of glaring systemic antipathy? Perhaps, the fault is ours when we expect a nation, that elects and exalts rape accused as political behemoths, to provide redemption against men who eviscerate a woman’s dignity to gratify their carnal appetite. The irony lies in the absurdity of this entire predicament.
Whilst the Constitution of India and penal laws provide a striking benchmark for protection, the price that women pay every day, goes unaccounted.
Snippets of recent horrors- A case study of futile outrage in the face of systemic apathy
Without recalling horrors of our past, if one were to recall incidents of apathy from the recent years, it does make us women wonder- who is the state really protecting? For instance, in August 2024, after the brutal rape of a young trainee doctor sparked nation-wide outrage, the intentional delay in investigation more so even the First Information Report was lodged belatedly.
The matter is yet pending before the Hon’ble Apex Court and the Calcutta High Court; however, the rage, disappointment, fear and exhaustion have in turn manifested into a condition of national despondence.
On 16th December, 2024, the Hon’ble Supreme Court issued notice to the Union and the States on the PIL filed by the Supreme Court Women Lawyers Association (SCWLA).
The petition sought CCTV cameras in workplaces, a review of safety rules for public transport, and a bar on Members of Parliament or Members of Legislative Assemblies who are accused of crimes against women contesting elections until acquitted. On the 28th of January, 2025, the Union argued that the petition’s prayers were very wide and sought time to file a counter-affidavit. Which, unfortunately remains pending.
The year began no different, but was yet another reminder that the safety of women is an ornamental an academic debate, a utopian ideal one might say.
On 22nd February, 2026 in Uttarakhand, a woman returning from the Saras Mela was forced at gunpoint to a deserted stretch near Thandi Sadak. Three men took turns raping her in front of her brother-in-law, slashed her finger when she resisted, and filmed the assault to keep her quiet.
On 11th March, 2026 in Patti Sheetal village in Bihar’s Saran district, a 16-year-old girl was allegedly dragged into a bathroom and gang-raped by five men, then thrown alive into a well, where she died. Weeks later a 17-year-old from Andhra Pradesh’s Kadapa ran from a stepfather who had been abusing her.
She found work at a tea stall in Berhampur, Odisha. On 29th March, 2026 she was lured by a boy she had befriended, given a drink laced with sedatives, and gang-raped by two men while the boy helped them. In April a 22-year-old IIT graduate was raped and strangled with a charger wire in her home in south Delhi’s Kailash Hills.
The accused, a former domestic help who used a spare smart card to get into her building, had allegedly raped a friend’s wife in Alwar, Rajasthan, the night before.
On the night of 11th May, 2026, a 30-year-old woman was gang-raped by a driver and his helper inside a moving private sleeper bus in Delhi’s Nangloi area after she refused them. In Jodhpur, two sisters killed themselves after eight men had allegedly gang-raped them, filmed the assaults, and blackmailed them for years. Thirty-three days after their FIR was filed, the police had taken no concrete action.
On 21st May, 2026 in Nuh, Haryana, a 19-year-old was gang-raped in her own home at one in the morning by men from her village, filmed and blackmailed. She died by suicide sixteen hours later.
In Assam’s Biswanath district, local people stopped a vehicle and rescued a 15-year-old who had been gang-raped inside it, repeatedly, over several months. And on 28th May, 2026 in Gwalior, a 15-year-old from Bhind was gang-raped and strangled on Gupteshwar Hill after one of her attackers tried to sell her to the other for ₹50,000. The next day the men came back, poured petrol on her body and set it alight.
In Karnataka’s Davanagere district, nine men and a minor were held for the gang rape of a woman at a farmhouse, which came to light only after videos of the assault surfaced.
On 11th June, 2026 in Begusarai, Bihar, five men broke into the home of a 28-year-old mother of four, stripped and bound her, and tortured her. Doctors later removed a bullet casing, stones and pieces of wood from her body.
The police first refused to register her complaint, and a private clinic turned her away. On 17th June, 2026 in Kiphire, Nagaland, an 82-year-old woman was allegedly raped by a police officer who lived in her building. In Rajasthan, a minor who went missing on 18th June, 2026 was sold by an e-rickshaw driver to a hotel owner.
Over five days she was kept drugged and moved between several hotels, and more than 30 men raped her while the operators coordinated over messaging apps and took commissions.
July followed the same pattern. On 4th July, 2026 an 11-year-old in Baruipur, West Bengal, left for a friend’s birthday party.
Her body was found the next morning in a garbage-filled pond, covered in bite marks. The post-mortem showed she had drowned, so she may have been alive when she was thrown in.
Her family says the police ignored their complaints, and the villagers found the accused themselves through shop CCTV footage.
In Uttar Pradesh, a seven-year-old was lured with the promise of food by a 22-year-old and a 16-year-old, gang-raped on the third floor of a building under construction, struck with a rod and thrown into the basement. She succumbed to her injuries.
In Bengaluru on 17th July, 2026 a neighbour allegedly lured a 14-year-old away on the pretext of visiting a temple and handed her to two men, who forced her to drink alcohol and assaulted her in an unfinished building. Days later in Mysuru district, three men dragged a 30-year-old migrant worker into their car as she walked home, then raped and robbed her.
In North Kashmir, a 22-year-old woman reported that two men had chased off her companion in the Dragbal forest and raped her while recording it on their phones.
Perhaps one would assume that women would at least be ‘allowed’ protection whilst protecting for their rights? Yet, July 2026 found police excesses and recorded cases of sexual misconduct during the 20th of July, 2026 protests at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi.
Not only was digital data collected from demonstrators, female participants reported facing coordinated online doxing, morphed imagery, character assassination, and severe rape threats.
The fact of the matter remains, when women cannot be controlled, they are condemned. And such condemnation either comes with a threat to their dignity more so, their lives.
On 04th August, 2026, a 16-year-old girl was subjected to gang rape by a driver and a conductor of a bus that she boarded from Greater Noida, Uttar Reportedly, the perpetrators extended life threats and left her at the Kashmere Gate Bus Terminal in Delhi.
In Hailakandi, Assam, a 16-year-old was gang-raped and murdered in her own home while her parents were away.
In Raichur, Karnataka, on 22nd August, 2026 a 21-year-old Dalit woman who had gone to a field to relieve herself was kidnapped, gang-raped and murdered. Her body was found face down in a well. Four police personnel were suspended for failing to respond promptly.
In Guwahati, a 15-year-old was abducted and gang-raped at a homestay, where two of the staff were among the five arrested.
At a temple festival in Thanjavur on 30th August, 2026 a man lured a 16-year-old away with a false promise of marriage, and four others, two of them boys aged 15 and 17, then followed and assaulted her.
September was no different. In Delhi’s Swaroop Nagar, a 16-year-old went to meet a boy she knew.
She was allegedly gang-raped in a tempo by him and his friends and stabbed to death after she threatened to report them. Her body, partly eaten by dogs, was so badly decomposed that investigators could not at first tell whether it was a man or a woman.
In Maharashtra, a former BJP MLA and a dismissed police constable were booked after a 22-year-old woman said they took her to a farmhouse on 13th September, held her at gunpoint, forced her to drink and raped her. The FIR was registered only after the Director General of Police stepped in. On 21st September, 2026 near Delhi’s Kalkaji Temple, three men posing as police officers threatened a 17-year-old and her friend with a gun and a knife, and then gang-raped her.
A Day later in Amroha, Uttar Pradesh, a woman from Haryana who had come to visit religious sites was gang-raped at a farmhouse.
All four accused were men in uniform: two from the Uttar Pradesh Police and two from the CRPF.
On 21st September, 2026; wherein a 17-year-old girl visited Kalkaji Temple in Southeast Delhi with her friend; was taken to Astha Kunj Park behind the Temple premises and sexually assaulted.
In Delhi NCR region itself, the beginning of September found 13 reported rape cases. One would expect that female Chief Minister would prove to be a welcome change towards bolstering the safety of women in the Delhi NCR region, conversely, the recent curfews imposed on women of premier female-only colleges of Delhi, shifting their mode of teaching to online classes is yet another case of how antipathy of women unites all genders.
And the oddest ordeal? The very men who are incapable of controlling their carnal appetites are yet on the streets without any restrictions; whilst women are prohibited from any movement.
When surveillance and deployment of specialised police personnels should have been the ordinary course of action, the system chose to chastise women and impose further restrictions on their mobility.
Are executive and law enforcement agencies turning into patronages of chauvinism? Or must we equip the young girls and women of our country with yet another ‘handbook for preventing rape’ or perhaps train them for a state of anxious hypervigilance till their death?
Why the adversarial system without strict timelines is a victim’s dystopia
The ineptness is not a bug in the system. For most women, it is the system in its entirety. It begins at the grassroots vis-a-via
the police station, where an FIR is still too often treated as a favour, a to be negotiated rather than a legal duty, and where a woman may be told to settle matters at home.
With roughly nine in ten rape trials unfinished in any given year, survivors wait years to testify, re-live the assault under hostile cross-examination, and face pressure, bribes and threats to turn hostile in the interim.
The fast-track courts announced after every outrage cannot outrun a backlog of 1.85 lakh cases. Forensic labs remain overstretched, so evidence that should take days takes months.
The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita replaced the Indian Penal Code in 2024 with much talk of a victim-centric justice system.
The first full year of data under the new code shows the same plateau, the same pendency, the same one-in-four conviction rate among the few trials that finish.
New statutes are the cheapest reform a government can offer. Functioning institutions are the expensive one, and that bill has never been paid.
The result is a machine that, whatever its intentions, is optimised to wear victims down until they give up. Every survivor who withdraws, every family that settles, every witness who turns hostile is recorded as a case closed. It is not.
It is a case abandoned by the state. This is the pattern that defines India’s relationship with its women: outrage, hashtags, a minister’s condemnation, a notice from a commission, and then forgetting. The crimes are not aberrations.
The way forward- Accountability in times of urgency
What frightens a would-be rapist is not a harsher sentence written into a statute. It is the certainty of being caught, charged and convicted promptly. Certainty and speed deter; severity alone does not.
Whilst the recent trends have shown that not only do such perpetrators feel entitled to gratify their carnal appetite, they also feel the urge to keep digital footprints of such barbaric acts as a token of their sickening sense of masculinity.
Every measure below is aimed at changing that arithmetic, and most use powers the law already grants but the state does not enforce.
It must begin at the police station, where most cases are lost before they start. Section 199 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 already punishes a public servant who fails to record information about a sexual offence; the Superintendent of Police should be required to sanction that prosecution within 30 days of any proven refusal, with automatic suspension entered in the officer’s service record.
In Begusarai and Raichur, suspensions came only after public outrage. E-FIRs and zero FIRs must become a tangible reality, through a single online and WhatsApp complaint channel in every district that issues an FIR number on the spot, a system the Supreme Court asked the Union about as far back as January 2025.
Stations should be tested with decoy complainants and the results published, as some states already do for corruption.
The two-month deadline for completing rape investigations under the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita must be enforced, with any officer who misses it explaining the delay to the court in writing and facing a service consequence; a missed 90-day deadline is how the accused in the R.G. Kar cover-up walked out on bonds of Rs 2,000.
Forensic capacity must sit where the crimes happen: sexual-assault evidence kits at every primary health centre and police station, DNA results within 30 days, and every lab publishing its backlog each month.
And every district needs a dedicated women’s crime unit, judged on convictions secured rather than arrests made, whose report is made public and sent to the Union for review against the crime rates of every district in every state.
The courts must then deliver verdicts in months, not years. Fast-track special courts need full-time judges, dedicated prosecutors and no other cases on their lists; the law already requires rape trials to finish within two months of the chargesheet, and High Courts should publish, court by court, how many actually do.
A survivor’s statement should be recorded on video before a magistrate within days, and trials held in camera as a mandatory rule, so that years of adjournments cannot be used to pressure her into turning hostile.
Adjournments in sexual-offence trials should be capped at two per side, with costs for any beyond that.
The Witness Protection Scheme approved by the Supreme Court in 2018 must be enforced: every survivor should have a protection officer, and any threat against her should be a separate arrestable offence.
Interim compensation should reach her within 15 days of the FIR, not years after the verdict, because a survivor with no money is the easiest to pressure into settling. One Stop Centres must stay open 24 hours, with a lawyer on duty.
Accountability must also become personal for the officials and institutions whose negligence makes these crimes possible.
A bus with eight challans and dead cameras should never have been on the road in Greater Noida, and the officers who let a non-compliant commercial vehicle keep running should face departmental action when a crime is committed on board.
When a woman is assaulted in a hospital, college or hostel, an independent inquiry should follow automatically, and any head of institution who delays reporting or disturbs the scene should be prosecuted.
Every district’s Superintendent of Police and District Magistrate should face a published annual scorecard of FIRs registered, chargesheets filed on time, conviction rates and cases pending.
Where the accused is a police officer, soldier or paramilitary member, as in Amroha and Kiphire, the case must move automatically out of his chain of command to an outside agency, with suspension on the day of the FIR and trial before a special court.
Legislators accused of sexual offences should be tried in the existing special courts for MPs and MLAs under a strict deadline, and political parties should be required to bar anyone facing such charges from candidacy.
Finally, the state must make public spaces hostile to predators and keep watch on those it already knows.
The National Database on Sexual Offenders exists but is barely used; it should be linked to tenant, domestic-help, driver and bus-crew verification, so that no operator, school or agency can hire without a check. Repeat offenders must be tracked on release and kept away from easy parole; the Kailash Hills accused had allegedly raped a woman in Alwar the night before.
No commercial bus should be licensed without CCTV linked to a control room, GPS and a panic button, curtains in sleeper-bus cabins should be banned, and any operator whose vehicle is used in a crime should lose its licence.
Every public space, police stations included, must have fully functioning CCTV with recordings stored safely. Roving night patrols and lit checkpoints should cover known high-risk roads, and every 112 calls from a woman should be tracked until a responder reaches her.
The encounter killing reported in Baruipur will be cheered by some.
It should not be. Extra-judicial shortcuts destroy evidence, shield anyone else involved, and teach the police that the lazy route is rewarded.
Blanket death sentences and castration have shown no deterrent effect, and they risk giving rapists a reason to kill the only witness and making families less willing to report a relative.
Their supporters argue that such penalties express society’s revulsion, and that argument deserves a hearing. But the evidence points one way: what frightens offenders is the likelihood of being caught, charged and convicted quickly, not a savage sentence that is rarely imposed.
None of this is radical. All of it is resisted, because it would make accountability personal. Until it does, India will keep producing the same annual ritual: a report in the spring, an outrage by the monsoon, a candlelight march, and a statistic by winter. The women of this country have been patient for far too long. The question is no longer what India feels about its women.
It is what India is willing to do. Until then, perhaps the one legacy that will transcend generations of women, is the curse of being born in a nation that has fails them.
The author acknowledges the assistance rendered by Ms. Sumedha Sen, Advocate and Ms. Prabisha Pradeep, Advocate to the Article.
