Who ensures that women make the best of opportunities offered by life in the city? Opportunities of education, work and enjoyment? If the study across five cities by Plan International is anything to go by, then the answer is simple. No one. According to the study, Unsafe in the City, 21,000 young women from Delhi, Lima, Madrid, Kampala and Sydney — cities in five continents — have said that boys and men leer, grope, stalk, insult them and flash, too, but they find it useless to complain. The indifference and inaction of passers-by and the administration leaves them feeling disempowered. It is possible that this report would give Indian administrators a feeling of satisfaction — such things happen all over the world — and also the excuse to be even more dismissive of women’s complaints of violence. Those with a preference for a criminal mindset are always relieved when criminality is seen to be widespread. In India, the nurturing of the criminal mindset allows the murder of men who fly to the defence of women being molested. Passers-by or companions of women are not always inactive in India; it is the administration that turns a blind eye to molesters and murderers.

Society’s silence regarding the daily ordeal of the young woman going out to study or work in a big city leads, in the first place, to a feeling of guilt. If the whole world is blind to the harassment, it must be the woman’s fault. It may be her clothes, her manner, or her gait, or it may simply be her decision to go out into the world, that is not quite right. Hence punishment is her due. What the study highlights is the women’s feeling of being coerced to adjust their existence to the overwhelming need to be safe. This daily adjustment undermines the uniqueness of their personalities and forces them into a confined sense of ‘femaleness’ rather than free ‘personhood’ or selfhood. Since the survey covers five leading cities across the world, these findings show that the equality or freedom of women remains a pitiful myth. If women are forced to accept daily harassment as ‘normal’, as the study shows, then none of the cities studied, or the countries that they belong to, can claim to be civilized.