Sexual harassment and various forms of sexual assault of women by strangers has been a problem in parts of Indian for decades but it has gotten far worse in India and spread during the past 20-25 years .... at least for non-poor, urban educated women.

With media liberalization (phone/Internet porn included), increased internal migration, reduction in extended family/joint-family living arrangements, increased female participation in the labor force, longer commutes to work/school, things have gotten uglier in terms of risk of sexual harassement/assault for the daughters of the non-poor too. For the poor, especially the rural and slum-dwelling poor, things have been ugly for a long, long time.

What you wear won't put a stop to the lewd comments and worse. Class is also no longer the sort of protection it used to be. If it weren't for foreigners and the educated classes being impacted, I doubt this plague in more and more of India would be getting the international attention it has been getting more recently. Even in India, the rapes of many thousands of Indian women by Indian security forces in some parts of the N and NE of India in the past two decades has never gotten the kind of domestic or international media attention that the rapes of some tourists or professional urban educated women does.

When the paramilitary and police have been engaged in sexual harassment and assault to such extent as I mention, confidence about women being safe from sexual assault in the rest of India drops.


I don't buy that dress gets respect. I have even seen hijab- or burka-covered women in India be on the receiving end of lewd sexual comments. This was nowhere near as likely 20 years ago in India as it is today. The social fabric of India today is quite different than it used to be. Can't get more conservative than that in India unless living the largely-disappeared purdah-esque lifestyle.