Accepting women’s equal right to space

When two Australian cricket players stepped out of their hotel in Indore to stroll down to a nearby café, they ended up inadvertently experiencing what Indian women do every day: Street sexual assault.

- Namita Bhandare

Some still call it eve-teasing as if it's some cute misdemeanor. This is not a new story but an old one. Back in the day, when I took the university special bus to college, some students carried safety pins in their bags to discourage men from getting too close. I'm told women still carry them.

Kalpana Vishwanath, the co-founder of an NGO for safer cities called —no surprise —Safetipin says things are changing with women more likely to speak up and police more willing to see this as the crime it is. But “outraging the modesty of women”, the category under which the National Crime Records Bureau records street sexual assault remains the second most reported crime, after domestic violence, with 83,891 cases reported in 2023.