By: Yogesh Arvind Puranik
Ask any woman in India how she gets home at night and you’ll hear about a whole routine. She calls someone when she arrives. She texts “leaving now” before she steps out. She skips the shortcut because the road is too dark. She walks with her keys wedged between her fingers. Most of us men never think about any of this, and that’s part of the problem.
We grow up in a country that worships goddesses, and yet the women in our lives plan their evenings around fear. Mothers hand this down to daughters like a family recipe. The numbers back it up. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, India records over 445,000 crimes against women every year, which comes to about 51 FIRs every hour. On the latest Women, Peace and Security Index, we rank 131st out of 181 countries. Each of those figures is a woman who now thinks twice about where she goes, when she comes back, and who she’d call if something went wrong.
For generations, our answer has been to shrink her world. Don’t stay out late. Don’t wear that. Don’t go alone. Let someone drop you home. Most of this comes from love, but it quietly makes her responsible for a danger she didn’t create. Safety shouldn’t cost a woman her freedom, her voice, or her space.
That’s where men come in, and I don’t mean as “protectors.” I’ve stopped liking that word. It puts us in front of women, as if they need shielding. I’d rather we stood beside them. That means saying something when a friend makes a degrading joke, even when it’s easier to laugh along. It means not brushing off casual misogyny as harmless banter. It means teaching our sons what consent actually looks like, and being willing to call out other men when they cross a line. Women don’t need to be told how to stay safe. The better question is what the rest of us are doing to make the world safer.
In my own community, this thinking led to something practical. I believe we have to work toward a society where no woman fears for her safety, but we also can’t pretend that society exists yet. So I pushed to make self-defense training a regular, expected part of growing up for every girl here.
The classes aren’t really about martial arts. They’re about confidence, awareness, and knowing your body is yours. A girl learns that her voice counts, that she can say no and mean it, and that she’s entitled to defend herself if someone ignores her. Watching a young girl plant her feet and hold her ground for the first time is something I won’t forget. Nobody is teaching her to be afraid. She’s learning that she has power.
Still, I worry about how this could be misused. Self-defense can’t become society’s excuse to hand the whole burden back to women. We can’t tell girls to learn to fight while ignoring the behavior that makes fighting necessary. That would be missing the point entirely.
The goal was never a country of women who are really good at protecting themselves. It’s a country where a woman can walk home, travel, work, study, celebrate, or just be in public without running the risk calculation in her head every time. Until we get there, I’ll keep arming girls with confidence and practical skills. But I’ll also keep insisting that we raise boys who understand that respect isn’t optional, that consent isn’t complicated, and that someone else’s boundaries aren’t ours to bargain over.
Women’s safety has been treated as women’s work for far too long. It will only change when every one of us treats it as our own.
