In India, the self-appointed custodians of tradition use the language of righteousness to hide deep-seated patriarchal hostility. Two horrific incidents have shaken the conscience of the nation, one in Bihar’s Jamui district and another in the national capital. Both reveal that in the guise of protecting and nurturing so-called “traditional value systems” lies a machinery of power, control, and violence.

In Bihar, the incident involved a teenage boy and girl, who were intercepted by a mob, aggressively interrogated, and physically assaulted. The videos captured the terrifying spectacle of the young girl being touched inappropriately as the two desperately pleaded for mercy. In the Delhi case, a 17-year-old girl and her teenage friend, who were walking in a park, were confronted by three men impersonating police officers. They restrained the boy and sexually assaulted the girl. A case under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act has been filed.

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These are not isolated instances of spontaneous lawlessness. They are the outcomes of a society that uses the vocabulary of morality to subjugate women, police their bodies, and control their autonomy and independence.

This control over women thrives in various forms, its patterns used to systemically contain women and their bodies under the guise of protection. Instructions to young girls are built on a framework of restrictions. A girl must continuously change her daily routine, restrict her education, or monitor her friendships to avoid being targeted. True safety does not look like a prison; it shouldn’t work on the principle of self-regulation. It should create conditions in which a woman can occupy public space and assert her sovereignty. She should be able to catch a bus or walk down a street without having to negotiate her fundamental human dignity.

When self-appointed moral guardians step in, as in the two cases above, they operate on the premise that a woman’s presence in public, in the company of a male

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peer, as a violation of an unspoken boundary. According to these so-called custodians, a woman who violates this boundary has forfeited her right to safety, thus giving any passing group of men the license to humiliate, discipline, or violate her human dignity.

The Delhi survivor is 17; the Bihar student too is an adolescent. These girls are explicitly recognised as children under Indian law. The POCSO Act was brought to protect such minors from manipulation, exploitation, and violence by adults. These two crimes show the grim reality of a deeply hypocritical collective social imagination that treats adolescent girls as children, denying them agency by stripping them of decision-making power and dictating their clothing, while judging them through the lens of blame and regarding them as adults when they are subjected to sexual violence. It shifts the burden of an adult male’s criminal behaviour onto a girl child’s shoulders. This blaming of the girl hides the grim truth, underlined time and again by bodies like UNICEF, that sexual violence is not an issue of mixed signals or broken rules. It is a result of unadulterated power that emanates from a male-centric power system.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, the number of crimes against children filed under the POCSO Act rose to 1,77,335 in 2023 from 1,62,449 in 2022. Many cases may not have been registered due to institutional fear, social stigma, and the trauma of public shaming. Innumerable victims, who face this moral policing or violence, may have been rendered silent. Moral policing thrives when it can manipulate discourse and strengthen male-centric narratives.

We need an overhaul of how we raise our boys. There is a need to reimagine and reexamine how we build our families, communities, and society. The time has come to liberate women’s bodies as the site of societal and cultural morality and to recognise that women’s rights over their bodies are inalienable, absolute and non-negotiable.

The writer is associate professor, Dr Ambedkar International Centre