Late last month, Delhi’s Lady Sriram College suspended classes and took them online for two days following the apprehension, close to its back gate, of an accused person in a sexual assault case involving a minor at Astha Kunj Park. While the suspension was prompted by students being asked by their parents to return home due to safety-related panic after the police encounter, the decision was rightfully called out for how it penalised women for the actions of men. It is a question that feminists have been asking for a very long time: why is it that the people most vulnerable to sexual violence are policed and restricted, and not the people who are statistically the most responsible for it?
In other words: unless boys have stricter curfews and are raised to behave respectfully, when men cease to participate in or enable harm, when society itself understands what consent means, such “corrections” are simply unfair, and not commensurate to the crime.
The assault spurred women-only protests in Delhi, primarily led by student groups, that raised issues related to public safety and institutional accountability about the same. The onus has to be squarely on the authorities to provide adequate security that focuses on monitoring and controlling threats, not monitoring and controlling women. This requires a mindset shift, the depatriarchalising of the chattel-oriented logic that protection is bound with power over.
In the same week, hundreds were detained without being able to demonstrate at a planned protest against purported electoral fraud organised by the Cockroach Janta Party in Delhi. Three women journalists have alleged that they have been sexually assaulted by members of the police during the crackdown.
Meanwhile, news comes from the USA about a rape by seven members of a frathouse (abetted by a 57-member group chat), at Cornell University two years ago. The survivor has sued the university, which is why it has become news at all, a grim reminder of how reported numbers of sexual violence are always only the tip of the iceberg. The incident calls to mind more: when we consider 57 men in a group chat, we remember that 50 men were convicted in 2024 of raping Gisele Pelicot. When we consider campus assault as a category of crime, the bravery of Emma Sulkowicz who carried the mattress that she was raped on from class to class at Columbia University for an entire academic year as a symbolic protest comes to mind.
Meanwhile, the ninth anniversary of when journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the story about Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein’s serial predation in The New York Times has just passed. That was one of the MeToo movement’s watershed moments, because the public revelations of various celebrities strengthened so many, many people around the world to own our truths. The movement’s transformative power still has reverberations today. It shifted the needle profoundly in spaces beyond the public eye.
These protests in Delhi carry language that became steeped in the collective conscious during that time, and echoes of so many battles by so many foremothers. Each such battle builds on, and becomes built on, ones waged and ones yet to come.