This morning, while flipping through the newspaper, my attention was drawn to a small news item tucked away in a corner of the fourth page: “Mothers held after sons harass girl.” The headline caught my eye; otherwise, newspapers today are routinely filled with reports of theft, scams, murder, rape, and sexual harassment.
The news described how a thirteen-year-old girl was repeatedly harassed by boys of her own age from a nearby locality while she was commuting to and from school. The girl was studying in Class VIII, whereas the boys, also around thirteen, were not attending school and spent their time loitering in the area. The police registered a case under the relevant child protection law and took the mothers of the boys into custody. Legal experts have since questioned whether parents should be held responsible for the actions of juvenile offenders.
I am not a legal expert, but the incident raises an important concern: who should be held responsible for such behaviour by thirteen-year-old boys? In the past, informal social controls—extended families, neighbourhoods, and community norms—played a role in shaping behaviour. Today, those controls have weakened due to nuclear families, migration, and rapid urbanisation. In this changing context, accountability becomes unclear. While the issue is complex, it is difficult to deny that the foundations of behaviour are laid early in life and often persist for a long time.
Before exploring this further, a few observations are important.
First, India reports a very large number of sexual offence cases every year. It is important to note that these figures reflect only reported cases, usually involving higher severity. Everyday harassment experienced by women and girls across social settings largely remains unreported and invisible.
Second, formal academic education has not adequately addressed inappropriate behaviour toward women and girls. Schools focus heavily on academic outcomes, while issues of respect, consent, boundaries, and emotional regulation are either addressed superficially or avoided altogether. As a result, children often learn these behaviours informally from peers, media, and social cues.
Third, it is concerning that strong resistance is rarely seen when popular media films like Kabir Singh and Animal or OTT platforms openly objectify women or glorify aggressive masculinity. Certain widely watched films normalise entitlement, control, and violence in relationships, yet sustained public pushback has been limited. Such portrayals shape social attitudes and contribute to an immature understanding of sexuality, reinforcing the idea among boys that abusive or dominating behaviour is acceptable or even admirable.
At this point, it is useful to distinguish between two forms of sexual violence.
Early-stage sexual violence refers to everyday, normalised behaviours such as lewd comments, staring, catcalling, sexist jokes, unwanted messages, or inappropriate touching. These acts are often dismissed as “minor,” go unreported, and are sustained by silence and social acceptance, yet they cause fear, humiliation, and long-term psychological harm.
Advanced-stage sexual violence includes serious criminal acts such as sexual assault, rape, coercion, trafficking, and extreme physical or sexual abuse. These acts involve clear violations of bodily autonomy and require formal legal and institutional intervention.
While early-stage and advanced-stage sexual violence exist on a continuum, they are driven by different dominant mentalities. Research and prevention frameworks consistently show that when early-stage sexual violence is ignored or normalised, it creates social conditions that increase the risk of more severe violence over time. This does not mean that every minor act escalates, but that tolerance at the early stage weakens collective boundaries.
Therefore, I believe that early-stage sexual violence is where society has the greatest opportunity to intervene. This is not about blaming all boys or all families, but about acknowledging a widespread cultural pattern. In many Indian families, boys are unknowingly taught entitlement, emotional privilege, and reduced accountability through everyday practices being given more freedom, excused behaviour, silence around consent, and shifting responsibility onto girls. These unspoken lessons normalise boundary violations later in life.
What boys should instead learn through family culture, schooling, and community interaction are respect for boundaries, personal responsibility, emotional literacy, and equality. These are not abstract values, but essential life skills that must be modelled consistently by parents, teachers, and adults around them.
This issue must therefore be treated as a social and behavioural challenge, not only as a legal one. Parents are the primary audience for change, schools are critical co-shapers, and communities including neighbours, transport workers, shopkeepers, and bystanders have an important role in responding to early-stage misconduct.
Just as national programs like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao were launched to address structural gender issues, a large-scale nationwide initiative such as “Kind Men, Strong Society” can be developed to raise respectful boys and prevent early-stage sexual harassment.
The hope is that after a decade of sustained, collective effort, flipping through a morning newspaper will no longer reveal stories of teenage girls being harassed by teenage boys.