Sex, the city and the university

(This article is a part of the web-exclusive series from our latest issue 'The Marriage Issue'. More from the print quarterly here.)

The rhetoric and practice of safety for women in Indian cities exerts a new strategy of control. Rooted in a sexual morality that seems a little more conservative every day, women are either imprisoned for 'their own protection', or when in 'couples' in public, semi-public or even private spaces, they are targeted, policed and punished for their sexual temerity. There appears to be a strange disorder in how questions of pleasure, freedom and safety for women are looked at in India now, perhaps because the country finds itself in an increasingly regressive social-political environment.

There is hardly any clarity about what constitutes 'safety', especially for women, since being in any kind of company, consensually or chaperoned, does not seem to exempt them from surveillance and punishment. The focus appears to be set entirely on the strict moral policing of sexual behaviour (all of it apparently prohibited outside the conjugal bedroom in the home), disguised thinly under a cloak of concern for women's safety. Unfortunately, every media-reported case of rape in the country produces more rabid fear-mongering, which instigates more unnecessary vigilantism over consensual sexual activity among adults, and deflection from identifying the very serious problems around rape. The state and other institutions need to ensure public spaces are as safe for women to roam in as men, instead of shrugging off this responsibility and dumping it on the women themselves by imposing curfews on their movements.