Every few years, a name enters our national consciousness like a wound

Every few years, a name enters our national consciousness like a wound. The 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder was one such moment. The recent Twisha Sharma case is another.

Between these names lie countless unnamed women, countless interrupted lives, and a recurring grief that returns with frightening familiarity. Each time, outrage follows. Laws are tightened. Debates erupt. And yet, after a brief period of collective introspection, society seems to slip back into its old emotional habits. One begins to wonder: why does violence against women remain so deeply entrenched?

Perhaps, because the problem is not merely legal. It is sociological, emotional, and civilisational. Even today, we remain a deeply gendered society. Families still quietly celebrate the birth of sons, quite differently. Girls grow up with freedoms attached to invisible conditions. They may study, work, travel, and speak more freely than previous generations, but many remain answerable for the clothes they wear, the hours they return home, and the choices they make. Freedom, for many women, continues to come with footnotes.

Marriage, too often, arrives in a woman’s life less as liberation and more as an adjustment—a structure to be navigated with patience and endurance. Many educated women eventually tire of the invisible labour of constantly negotiating space for themselves within relationships, workplaces, and society itself.

Yet reducing the conversation into a battle between men and women may itself be a part of the problem. Men, too, inherit difficult emotional scripts. Raised constantly to be “man enough”, many grow up learning suppression before self-awareness. Vulnerability becomes weakness. Gentleness becomes suspect. Emotional fluency is rarely encouraged. A society that conditions boys to equate masculinity with dominance should not be surprised when distortion resurfaces elsewhere in adulthood.

Perhaps the deeper issue lies in the way we raise children altogether. We do not merely nurture them; we script them. Boys are subtly taught entitlement. Girls inherit caution. Fear becomes gendered. Freedom becomes gendered. Even empathy becomes gendered. By the time adulthood arrives, inequality has already been rehearsed so thoroughly that it begins to appear natural.

And, this contradiction is especially perplexing in a civilisation that so often speaks of morality, religion, and tradition. We invoke values constantly, yet one cannot ignore the strange emotional barrenness visible around us—the inability to see another human being fully and compassionately. T. S. Eliot once wrote of a spiritual ‘waste land’; at times, one feels, modern society confronts that emptiness.

Perhaps the question is larger than how to raise better boys or protect girls more effectively. Perhaps, the real question is how to raise human beings who do not diminish another life in order to affirm their own. Social harmony cannot be built upon fear, resentment, or domination.

Men and women are meant to coexist—share homes, responsibilities, affection, and the burdens of living. A healthy society cannot emerge from mutual hostility. It can emerge only from mutual dignity.

Sangeeta Kampani, formerly with the IRS, retired as Commissioner of Income Tax, Delhi

Editor (Planning & Projects) Shalini Langer curates the fortnightly ‘She Said’ column