India's relationship with sexual violence is one long painful truth that many refuse to acknowledge. According to the NCRB, 4,48,211 crimes against women were reported in 2023 alone, of which 29,670 were rape cases. These are only the crimes that made it onto paper. It has long been argued that the actual numbers are many times higher, buried under a mountain of social shame, institutional failure, and deliberate silencing.
What a survivor faces in India does not begin and end with the act of violence itself. In many cases, the trauma that follows, at the hands of family, community, law enforcement, and the state, can be just as devastating.
The first wall for sexual abuse victims is the police station. Rather than being a safe haven to seek justice, police stations across India have repeatedly been documented to turn away, dismiss, or actively discourage victims from filing an FIR.
Human Rights Watch found in its investigation of 21 sexual violence cases that women and girls struggled profoundly, both before and after filing complaints, to access any meaningful help.
In many rape cases, police have historically spent more time seeking reconciliation or even gone as far as suggesting marriage between the attacker and the victim in some cases to "save face."
The attitude of the police could not be more obvious: "Go home, and sort it out between yourselves."
If the police were not enough of a barrier to seeking justice, the deeply conservative indian society comes into play. The indian society has long been conditioning communities to look at sexual violence as the effect of the victim's behaviour, rather than the perpetrator's. "What was she wearing? Where was she going at that hour? Why was she alone?"
These are genuine questions that are asked by the people in our own communities, the victim's own family, their neighbors, and sometimes even medical professionals who administer the rape kits to the victims.
Victim-blaming has become so normalised in our society that it extends from our own mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters all the way to political figures who have made public statements suggesting women "invite" assault through their clothing.
Survivors who do speak out frequently face ostracism in society, sometimes forced to marry their abusers, or face immense pressure from their own families to retract their accounts to "preserve a household's reputation."
This is the violence of silence suffered by sexual abuse victims.
Then comes the suffering of women from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. In Maharashtra's Beed district, a region built on sugarcane farming, thousands of women have been subjected to forced or coerced hysterectomies, a practice designed solely for increasing their labour output.
Contractors who supply farm owners with labour would encourage the surgeries, arguing that menstruation and pregnancy made women unreliable workers. Private clinics often falsely told women they had cancer and would die without the procedure.
Women in these communities had no meaningful agency over their own bodies. They were expected to work fourteen-hour days through menstrual pain, through illness, through pregnancy, in makeshift field settlements without clean water or basic sanitation. If that were not enough, women who go to work as maids, or cleaners in richer households often go through sexual abuse by the men of the house who think they "deserve" to do such things because they pay the woman's salary.
At the end of the day, though, not all sexual abuse victims are women, many men have gone through the same violence usually perpetrated upon women.
This invisibility does an enormous disservice to male survivors, whose numbers are far larger than the public record suggests. Ministry of Women and Child Welfare reports that over half (52.94%) of child sexual abuse victims were boys. In several forms of severe sexual abuse, boys made up the majority of victims.
Yet India's legal framework offers them limited redressal. Under the recently enacted Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023, which replaced the Indian Penal Code, the old provision under Section 377 that had criminalized non-consensual sexual acts regardless of gender was removed.
Hence, adult male rape is, in effect, legally unrecognised. Indian society doesn't treat male victims better, rather they treat them even worse than the female victims. Male survivors who attempt to speak out are met with ridicule, disbelief, and the expectation that men cannot be victims.
This combination of legal erasure and social mockery means the overwhelming number of male survivors never come forward at all, and the acts of violence towards them go fully unacknowledged.
India is a country that can mobilise enormous grief when violence against women captures national attention, as it did for Nirbhaya. Laws can be amended, funds can be allocated, and committees can be formed. But still, those funds go unspent, the committees' recommendations sit unimplemented, and a survivor walking into a police station in a rural district faces much the same hostility she would have faced a decade ago.
The problem is not solely legal or institutional, but it is cultural. And until we fix our so called culture that protects the perpetrators, all these victims of sexual abuse will continue to be shunned, silenced, and killed.
And yet, there are organisations to pick up the slack that the government doesn't. Majlis, a Mumbai-based team of women lawyers and activists, has provided legal and social support to over 80,000 victims of domestic and sexual violence. Dilaasa, a crisis centre for women in Mumbai, offers counselling and advocacy services to survivors navigating a hostile system.
The International Foundation for Crime Prevention and Victim Care (PCVC), based in Chennai, runs a round-the-clock crisis hotline and provides emergency rehabilitation, housing, and employment support to survivors.
My Choices Foundation, operating across 10 states in over 6,500 locations, works against both domestic abuse and sex trafficking, running counselling centres and a national anti-trafficking helpline. Swayam, a feminist organisation based in Kolkata, works on ending violence against women through legal aid and community support.
These organisations don't exist because they must, but rather fill the space that our justice systems didn't fill.
India is a country that can mobilise enormous grief when violence against women captures national attention, as it did for Nirbhaya. Laws can be amended, funds can be allocated, and committees can be formed. But still, those funds go unspent, the committees' recommendations sit unimplemented, and a survivor walking into a police station in a rural district faces much the same hostility she would have faced a decade ago.
The problem is not solely legal or institutional, but it is cultural. And until we fix our so called culture that protects the perpetrators, all these victims of sexual abuse will continue to be shunned, silenced, and killed.