“A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy.”
Those words came from Mukesh Singh, one of the men convicted of the 2012 Nirbhaya gang rape and murder, in a jailhouse interview recorded in 2013. They shocked the country.
Thirteen years later, a woman on a Delhi street is asked why rape keeps happening in her city. She points to what women wear. The reporter asks about the children who are molested. She has an answer for that too: the parents should have been watching.
She is not a convict. She is a passer-by, speaking to a camera in the week a 17-year-old was allegedly gang-raped in a park near Kalkaji temple. And she is far from alone.
“Put a curfew for men after 8 p.m. Let ladies walk out.”
That was a judge of the Kerala High Court in 2022, hearing a challenge to curfews in a women’s hostel. He meant it to provoke. Four years later, after another girl was allegedly gang-raped in a Delhi park, versions of his line are doing the rounds online, alongside their exact opposite: cover up, come home early, stay in.
A park, a temple, and three men who said they were police
On the evening of 21 September, a 17-year-old girl visited Kalkaji Mandir in southeast Delhi with a friend her age. After praying, the two walked into Aastha Kunj Park, a 200-acre green space behind the temple.
According to police, they separated the teenagers, threatened them with weapons, took the girl to a secluded part of the park and sexually assaulted her. Photograph: (The Hindu)
Three men approached them, claiming to be police officers. According to police, they separated the teenagers, threatened them with weapons, took the girl to a secluded part of the park and sexually assaulted her. Her friend called the police control room afterwards. All three accused were arrested by 22 September and have been sent to judicial custody. The case has been registered under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the POCSO Act.
It was not an isolated case. ThePrint counted at least 13 reported cases of rape and sexual assault across Delhi-NCR in the first three weeks of September alone. Several involved children. The alleged attacks happened in homes, shops, hotels and neighbourhoods, and the accused ranged from relatives and neighbours to strangers.
On 28th September, 2026, the Supreme Court took suo motu cognisance of the cases, including the Kalkaji assault and the alleged assault of a minor on a moving sleeper bus. A bench of Justices JB Pardiwala and K Vinod Chandran said the incidents raised serious questions about law enforcement, and referred back to the 2012 Nirbhaya case.
Fourteen years after Nirbhaya, the country is having the same conversation. Who is it asking to change?
What the numbers say before the arguments begin
About 80 rapes are reported in India every day. The National Crime Records Bureau recorded 29,536 rape cases in 2024, within 4,41,534 crimes against women overall.
Delhi’s rate is roughly double the national average. The capital recorded 130.7 crimes per lakh women, against a national rate of 64.6.
In 96.8% of rape cases, the accused was known to the survivor. That includes family members, friends, neighbours, employers and partners, per NCRB 2024 data. Strangers in a park, like the Kalkaji case, are the exception.
Four in ten urban women do not feel safe. The NARI 2025 survey of 12,770 women in 31 cities, released by the National Commission for Women, found 40% felt “not so safe” or “unsafe”. Delhi ranked among the least safe cities.
Most harassment never reaches a police station. Two-thirds of incidents go unreported, the same survey found. Of the complaints made, action followed in only 16% of registered cases.
For every conviction, nearly three acquittals. In 2024, cases of crimes against women ended in 45,832 convictions and 1,23,340 acquittals.
Hold these numbers in mind as you read what people are saying.
1. “Women should change”
One of the loudest reactions online is also the oldest. It holds that women can prevent violence by changing how they dress, speak, and move.
In a video shared by edgenewsin, a woman argues that men respond to how women behave and dress. A boy, she says, will not hold a girl’s wrist unless the girl speaks to him first. She goes on to suggest that women who wear very little should expect to be looked at.
In a video shared by soonali_singh, a man points to the interviewer’s bare arm and compares it with his own sleeve. Women who show skin, he argues, distract men. She pushes back. If a man cannot control himself at the sight of an arm, she asks, why is the arm the problem?
And in the video shared by jist.news, the woman from our opening blames clothing for rape, then blames parents when asked about children.
The instinct is not confined to street interviews. Public figures have offered versions of it for years. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee drew criticism for remarks advising women against going out at night.
But laws and hashtags have not closed the gap between a crime and justice for it. Photograph: (Hindustan Times)
What the data says: The accused is known to the survivor in 96.8% of reported rapes. Many of this month’s Delhi-NCR cases involved children, and several happened inside homes. Clothing does not explain a crime committed by an uncle, a neighbour, or a man posing as a policeman.
2. “Keep women out after dark”
The state’s first response followed a similar logic, though it came with more than restrictions.
Two days after the assault, the Delhi Development Authority announced that its parks with multiple gates would allow entry only through selected gates after sunset. New signboards will advise visitors to stay in well-lit areas. The DDA also ordered more CCTV cameras, lighting, security staff and night patrols, and a safety audit of its parks within a week. The Lieutenant Governor directed a similar audit of all Delhi parks.
Residents’ welfare associations near Aastha Kunj have flagged poor lighting, broken boundary walls and thin security at the 142-acre park. Those fixes are real. But critics argue that fewer gates and advisories about where to walk put the burden back on the people being harmed. An opinion piece in ThePrint put it plainly: restricting entry is not the same as making a park safe.
What the data says: The NARI survey found women’s sense of safety falls sharply after dark, and names poor lighting and unreliable transport as causes. Lights, patrols and audits address that directly. Closing gates does not.
3. “Keep men indoors instead”
At the other end of the spectrum, some people have flipped the argument. If curfews keep women safe, the reasoning goes, put the curfew on men and boys.
The idea has a history. In 2017, then Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi, defending early curfews in women’s hostels, suggested boys be held to the same deadlines. In 2022, a Kerala High Court judge said much the same thing from the bench, in the line that opened this piece (Option B). Students of Delhi’s Pinjra Tod movement have campaigned against gendered hostel curfews since 2015.
What the data says: A curfew for men makes a sharp rhetorical point. It shows how absurd it is to lock up the people who are not committing the crime. As policy, though, it would miss most cases. If 96.8% of accused are known to survivors, most violence happens in places a curfew does not reach.
4. “Fix the city and the system”
On 23 September, students from Lady Shri Ram College, Miranda House, Gargi College, Kamala Nehru College and other Delhi University colleges marched near the LSR campus. Their demands were specific: better lighting, working CCTV, reliable policing, and safe routes to and from college.
In a video shared by priyanshireport, the reporter notes that many protesters wore masks. According to her, they feared their college administrations would identify them and take action. She asks why young women must hide their faces while demanding the freedom to move without fear.
Content creator mainirmalhoon backs the students. Safety, he argues, cannot mean women being tracked, watched, locked in parks, or told what to wear and when to return home. It means safer streets, better public transport and firm action on harassment. He notes that the march was led by women, and that men can stand with them without taking the stage.
What the data says: This is the argument best supported by evidence. The NARI survey found neighbourhoods (38%) and public transport (29%) were where most harassment happened. Lighting, transport and responsive policing are measurable, fixable problems.
5. “We stand with them”
Not every response is an argument. Some are simply solidarity.
amoolya_26 shared a short message about women standing with women. It is brief, and it is one of thousands like it. While some of the conversation fixates on what women should or should not do, a large part of it is simply people telling the protesters they are not alone.
What conversations can do, and where they stop
Conversations matter. The outrage after Nirbhaya in 2012 pushed India to rewrite its rape laws within months. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita replaced the Indian Penal Code in 2024. The Supreme Court stepped in again today.
But laws and hashtags have not closed the gap between a crime and justice for it. Two-thirds of harassment goes unreported. Only one in four women surveyed by NARI trusted authorities to handle a complaint well. And a string of cases has again raised questions about why tougher laws and punishments have not curbed sexual violence.
A conversation can shift what people think. It cannot, on its own, fix a streetlight, retrain a police station, or change what a 14-year-old boy learns about respect at home. That work is slower, less viral, and already underway.
On 28th September, 2026, the Supreme Court took suo motu cognisance of the cases, including the Kalkaji assault and the alleged assault of a minor on a moving sleeper bus. Photograph: (Matricula Education)
The people already doing the work
The Better India has reported on people turning this conversation into something concrete. Here are four.
1. The artist who got Bengaluru’s streetlights fixed. After two boys spat on her in the street, artist Indu Antony began working with Anganwadi women in the city’s HBR Layout. Together they mapped streets where women had been attacked, took petitions to ward meetings, and got broken streetlights replaced. She later opened Namma Katte, a public space behind Banaswadi railway station where women can simply sit and rest. Read the story.
2. The app that audits streets the way the DDA now plans to. Delhi’s Kalpana Viswanath built Safetipin to rate streets on lighting, footpaths, visibility, transport and crowds. Users can see which routes are safer and contribute data of their own. Since launching in Delhi, it has reached cities from Bengaluru and Dhaka to Bogotá and Nairobi. Read the story.
3. A guide to raising boys who respect boundaries. With Equal Community Foundation, The Better India created Raising Boys Right, a guide for parents and teachers on teaching consent, empathy and respect. Experts say these lessons begin far earlier than most parents think, often by 14. Read the guide.
4. The Chennai lawyer who built a map of help for survivors. Kirthi Jayakumar’s Saahas app lists verified organisations offering survivors medical and legal aid, shelter and more. As of our 2020 report, it had over 40,000 organisations in its network across 197 countries and had reached 8,000 survivors. Read the story.
The conversation will continue
It should. But the students who marched in Delhi were not asking for another debate about sleeves or curfews. They were asking for lights that work, buses that come, police who answer, and the freedom to be out after dark without an explanation.
In 2024, cases of crimes against women ended in 45,832 convictions and 1,23,340 acquittals.
They are not asking to be protected. They are asking for a city that does not need to protect them from itself.
If you or someone you know has experienced sexual violence, the Women Helpline is 181, and the national emergency number is 112.
