By Deepabali Datta
Every time a girl is assaulted, we hand our daughters yet another list of dos and don’ts. The Supreme Court’s latest directions call for more patrols, driver checks and safety audits, and every one of these measures is necessary. But they secure the door after the intruder has already entered. Who speaks to the boy before he gets there?
Most girls in India learn the rules of survival before they master long division. Be home before dark. Share your live location. Don’t wear that. Call when you reach. Hold your keys between your fingers as you walk to the car.
Nobody hands over this list all at once. It arrives in instalments, delivered by mothers, aunts, teachers and the news, growing a little longer after every horrific headline. By 18, following its instructions has become as instinctive as carrying a cellphone: an everyday habit, practised without thought. It may well be the most widely followed syllabus in India, except that boys are never enrolled.
In September 2026, the list grew longer still when another reported sexual assault shocked Delhi. A 17-year-old girl was allegedly gang raped by three men posing as policemen in Aastha Kunj Park near Kalkaji Temple. All three accused were arrested and remanded to judicial custody. The alleged perpetrators had appropriated the very identity girls are taught to trust. What rule should we add now? Don’t trust a man who says he is a policeman?
Around the same time, the Supreme Court took suo motu cognisance of a series of sexual assaults in Delhi-NCR. Among the incidents were the alleged gang rape of a minor aboard a moving sleeper bus, which the police failed to intercept over 47 kilometres, and the alleged gang rape and murder of a teenage girl in Swarup Nagar.
The Court did not mince its words. It described the incidents as reflecting “a systematic failure on the part of the law enforcement and the public administrative authorities” and declared that “expressing solidarity is not a solution to this social evil.”
The message was unmistakable: sympathy after a crime cannot substitute for responsibility before it.
In In Re: Recent Rape Incidents in Delhi NCR, 2026 INSC 1096, a Supreme Court bench, comprising Justices JB Pardiwala and K Vinod Chandran, directed the authorities to strengthen beat patrolling, particularly around educational institutions and high-risk areas; strictly verify bus, cab and app-based drivers; educate passengers about SOS facilities; remove parked vehicles that create blind spots; and act against unlicensed liquor shops.
The Court also questioned whether existing initiatives, including Shishtachar Squads, were effective on the ground or existed largely on paper. It required the chief secretary and the commissioner of police to submit compliance affidavits, making clear that they would be personally answerable for non-compliance.
These are necessary interventions. Women and girls cannot be asked to wait for a transformation in social attitudes before expecting protection on the streets. Police patrols must work, transport providers must be accountable, and public spaces must be made safer.
Yet, consider the direction in which these measures point. They focus on the street, the bus, the dark corner and the liquor shop. They fortify the world around the girl, making it harder for a potential offender to reach her. What they do not establish, however, is a comparable programme to teach boys, at home and in the classroom, about consent, bodily autonomy and respect.
That omission lies at the heart of the problem. We have become increasingly adept at telling girls how to avoid danger without asking with equal urgency why some boys believe they are entitled to inflict it.
A FIRE EXTINGUISHER IS NOT FIRE SAFETY
For more than a decade, India’s response to sexual violence has relied heavily on strengthening criminal law and increasing punishment. Following the December 2012 Delhi gang rape, Parliament expanded the definition of rape and enhanced penalties through the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013. In 2018, the law introduced the death penalty for the rape of a girl below 12 years. Under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, gang rape of a woman below 18 years is punishable with imprisonment for the remainder of the offender’s natural life or, in specified circumstances, death.
Yet, the National Crime Records Bureau recorded 29,536 cases of rape in 2024, while reported crimes against children rose by 5.8 per cent to 1,87,702.
These figures do not, by themselves, establish whether harsher penalties have succeeded or failed as a deterrent. Nor do they suggest that punishment is unimportant. A society that does not punish sexual violence seriously cannot claim to protect its women and children. But the persistence of these crimes makes one thing clear: punishment alone is not enough.
A fire extinguisher is indispensable when a fire breaks out. It cannot replace fire prevention. Similarly, criminal law must punish offenders, but it cannot, by itself, teach a child the difference between affection and entitlement, intimacy and coercion, or consent and submission. Punishment is an essential part of the response, but it comes after the harm. Prevention must begin much earlier.
THE FORGOTTEN HALF OF THE VERMA COMMITTEE’S RECOMMENDATIONS
In the aftermath of December 2012, when public outrage filled India’s streets, the Justice JS Verma Committee submitted its report within a month. The report is widely remembered for its recommendations on criminal law, many of which informed the 2013 amendments. Less remembered is its insistence that education must form an integral part of the response to sexual violence.
The Committee called for a drastic overhaul of school curricula and argued that sex education should be made an integral part of education. Gender sensitisation was not an optional supplement to criminal justice. It was part of the effort to address the social attitudes that enable violence.
More than 13 years later, the question of when such education should begin remains unresolved.
A case from Uttar Pradesh brought the issue back before the Supreme Court. In X vs State of Uttar Pradesh, 2025 SCC OnLine SC 2200, a bench comprising Justices Sanjay Kumar and Alok Aradhe was considering the bail plea of a 15-year-old accused under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 (POCSO). The Court asked the state government to explain how sex education was incorporated into its school curriculum.
The state’s affidavit described a curriculum for Classes IX to XII, framed in accordance with NCERT guidelines. On October 8, 2025, while confirming its earlier order granting the boy bail, the Court observed that “sex education should be provided to the children from a younger age and not from Class IX onwards”.
The significance of that observation extends well beyond the case itself. It took the country’s highest court to remind us of an unfinished task identified more than a decade earlier. If children are old enough to encounter questions of sexuality, relationships and bodily boundaries, they are old enough to begin receiving age-appropriate guidance about them.
This is not a call to introduce adult concepts indiscriminately to young children. It is a call for age-appropriate education that develops progressively: bodily autonomy and personal boundaries in the early years, followed by a deeper understanding of consent, respect, equality and healthy relationships as children mature.
THE LAW ALREADY RECOGNISES THE IMPORTANCE OF AWARENESS
Section 43 of the POCSO Act places a duty on the central and state governments to ensure that the Act’s provisions are publicised regularly through television, radio and print media, so that children, parents, guardians and the wider public understand its protections.
The principle is important. Enacting a law is not enough; people must know what it says and how it protects them. But public awareness of a statute is not the same as education that changes behaviour.
A 12-year-old boy needs more than information about legal penalties. He needs to understand that another person’s body is not his to control, that consent cannot be presumed, that a refusal must be respected, and that a girl’s clothing, location or decision to trust someone never makes her responsible for an assault.
These lessons cannot be left to chance, acquired through hearsay or postponed until adolescence. They must become a consistent part of growing up.
CONSIDER WHAT WOMEN CARRY EVERY DAY
They text “reached” to a family group. They pretend to be on a phone call in a cab. They assess a man’s gaze before they process his words. They choose a longer, brighter route home rather than the shorter, darker one.
None of this is paranoia. It is an adaptation to a world in which vigilance has become routine. Women have learnt to anticipate danger because society has repeatedly taught them that failing to anticipate it may carry a terrible price.
The injustice lies not merely in the precautions themselves, but in the unequal distribution of responsibility. Daughters are taught how to avoid being harmed; boys are too often left to work out for themselves what it means not to harm others.
To the men reading this, the argument is not an accusation. Most men do not commit sexual violence. But good intentions are no substitute for explicit teaching about consent, respect and boundaries. Many men learnt these principles through family values, personal experience or the example of others. Others may never have been asked to examine them seriously.
OUR SONS DESERVE BETTER THAN GUESSWORK
Teaching sons must mean more than repeating a slogan after another assault. It requires age-appropriate lessons on consent and bodily autonomy from the early years, reinforced as children grow older. It requires parents to participate, ensuring that what schools teach is reflected in everyday language and behaviour at home. It requires trained teachers, a defined place for this education in school curricula, and regular reviews to establish whether the lessons are being taught effectively.
It also requires the State to recognise prevention as a sustained public responsibility rather than a campaign launched after a tragedy. Schools, families, communities and public institutions must work together, while the police and criminal justice system continue to enforce the law.
None of this diminishes the urgency of the Supreme Court’s directions. Girls need protection on the streets today. Drivers must be verified, dangerous blind spots removed, emergency systems made functional and police held accountable. The Court is right to insist that the authorities fulfil their responsibilities.
But if that is the entirety of our response, the burden of safety will once again fall on women and girls: where they go, what they wear, when they return and whom they trust. We will have made their precautions more elaborate without confronting the attitudes that make those precautions necessary.
The Supreme Court is scheduled to review compliance with its directions on November 16, 2026. Reports will be filed, patrols counted and official assurances examined. Such accountability matters, particularly when institutional failures have been identified.
But no compliance affidavit will tell us how many boys were taught this year that “no” is a complete sentence. No patrol register will record how many young men learnt that masculinity does not confer entitlement. And no safety audit will measure how many parents challenged the casual sexism that children absorb long before they understand its consequences.
These are harder questions to ask because their answers require more than administrative instructions or amendments to criminal law. They require a change in how we raise children, how we discuss gender and how we define responsibility.
For generations, we have taught our daughters how not to be attacked. It is time we began teaching our sons not to attack.
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