The alleged gang rape of a 17-year-old girl at Aastha Kunj Park near Delhi’s Kalkaji area, and the subsequent investigation into the incident, have once again brought conversations around women’s safety into public focus. Days earlier, a woman biker in Gurugram was allegedly chased and rammed by a car on Golf Course Road after she asked the driver to stay away, an incident captured on camera and widely shared online.
Beyond the immediate questions of policing and public safety, these incidents also raise a quieter question: what are boys being taught about respect, boundaries, rejection and women as they grow up?
For mothers and teachers, the answer does not always come in the form of a formal conversation. Often, it is built into ordinary life.
Start before the conversation feels necessary
Neetu Sarin, a Delhi-based psychoanalyst and mother to a four-year-old boy, believes conversations around gender begin much earlier than parents may realise. “There is no particular age you have to start with,” she says, pointing instead to the everyday messages children receive, from the colours they are encouraged to wear to whether a boy is allowed to engage with his feminine side such as playing with dolls or taking up gardening. For Sarin, even a seemingly ordinary interaction can carry a message about gender and diversity. She argues that conversations should not be reduced to one (and done) formal “birds and bees” talk, but should be more inclusive and ongoing such as what felt soft and resourceful to the child in the day, what felt depleting, what made them feel adequate and what help did they find difficult asking for?
Gender sensitivity begins with sensitivity towards one's own masculine and feminine unity within, as well as discerning its myriad manifestations in others.
At 12, Pooja Iyengar’s son is still too young, she feels, for detailed conversations about incidents such as the recent rape or assault cases. But that does not mean the subject of gender is absent at home.
The Bhopal-based Chairman of Mahashakti Seva Kendra says she actively challenges stereotypes her son encounters about women. Her son is a badminton player and admires women badminton players, giving her an everyday opportunity to reinforce that ability, ambition and achievement are not determined by gender. She has also spoken to him about periods and the need to respond with understanding and kindness towards women. The more difficult conversations about rape and assault, she says, will come when he is older and better equipped to understand them.
Making consent less intimidating
For Subitha, a teacher and mother to a 15-year-old boy from Kerala, conversations around recent sexual cases and harassment have to be approached without making them intimidating. When such subjects come up, she brings the conversation back to a basic idea he can understand: consent. “We have to start with consent,” she says, explaining that if there is no consent, there should be no touch.
She also believes that conversations about relationships should remain open enough for children to ask questions without feeling embarrassed. When it comes to crushes and relationships, Subitha says she has spoken to her son with humour, while still establishing boundaries and talking about rejection. “We have a boundary,” she says, describing how these conversations can be handled lightly while still making the limits clear.
For her, the larger concern is that children may not have enough awareness about consent and sexual health. She believes these conversations need to begin earlier, rather than waiting until children are older, particularly because young people are already encountering these situations in schools and elsewhere.
What boys see at home
Sony Kumari, a Delhi-based teacher and mother to a 14-year-old boy, believes the strongest lessons may not be lessons at all. She points to household responsibilities as one example. If boys see fathers cooking, helping at home and treating mothers as equal participants in decision-making, equality becomes part of the household rather than an idea explained to them.
When asked about the recent cases of sexual harassment and assault, Kumari says she encourages her son to look at girls with the same empathy and consideration he would have for his own sister. She asks him to think about how he would feel if a similar incident happened to a member of his family, a way, she says, of helping children understand the human impact of such incidents rather than seeing them as something that happens only to “someone else”.
That sense of empathy also extends to how boys understand their own emotions. Kumari rejects the idea that boys should suppress their feelings and tells her son that if a classmate appears upset, he can simply ask, “Are you okay?”, a small gesture that teaches him to notice and respond to another person’s emotions.
The school environment matters too. Kumari recalls gender-sensitisation workshops and says teachers and parents need to work together rather than treating these conversations as the responsibility of one or the other.
When the world enters the conversation
For filmmaker and children’s book writer Samina Mishra, whose son is now 25, conversations about gender and relationships were never a one-time intervention. “They are not a lesson that you just have to do once,” she says, arguing that values have to be built into everyday life and into the way people treat those who are both like and unlike them.
Mishra also believes parents need to respond when something enters a child’s world, whether through school, the news, friendships or media. As a filmmaker, she is particularly conscious of how films can romanticise persistence, possessiveness or jealousy. Rather than simply blaming the media, she says parents can watch and discuss what children are seeing, allowing them to question those portrayals.
That may be the common thread running through these different approaches: the difficult conversations do not have to wait for a headline. They can begin with a rejected crush, a household chore, a sports idol, a film, a question about periods or a friend who seems upset.
For Sarin, the work begins even earlier, in the messages children absorb before parents realise they are teaching them anything at all. And for Mishra, the responsibility remains with adults too: “listen to the children, live an examined life yourself and give children the opportunity to be in spaces and with people who are different from them.”