Speaking from personal experience, I do not exactly remember when I first heard these words “Be careful” but I am sure every girl once did. I remember taking countless local bus journeys from school and tuition centers. I must have been in my teens and my mother’s instructions kept ringing in my head every time I boarded the bus. She would often tell me, “Sit close to women.
Keep your bag in front. Do not let anyone stand too close. If someone makes you uncomfortable,
move away. If the bus empties, get off and wait for another one.”
As a teenager, all these instructions did not sound unusual then. They were spoken with the tenderness only a mother possesses. But years later, I realized something unsettling. While boys of my age were learning routes and destinations, girls were learning survival. And as I grew older, these lessons multiplied.
Do not board an auto-rickshaw without looking carefully at the driver. Memorize the registration
number. Share your live location with someone at home. Avoid deserted roads, even if they are
shorter. Do not wear earphones while walking. Pretend to be on a phone call if you feel someone
is following you. Return home before it gets dark.
Sadly, every woman I know carries almost a similar list unconsciously in their heads. These habits are not born out of imagination but passed on to daughters by their mothers and then from sisters to younger sisters, friends to friends. It is an inheritance no one wishes to receive, yet every girl does.
Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, fear becomes a part of the routine. The tragedy is not only that sexual abuse exists but the horrifying fact that girls begin preparing for such situations way before they even encounter them. Girls learn caution before they learn confidence.
We label these precautions as ‘common sense’ but I believe there is nothing common about asking a child to carry the burden of protecting herself from the failures of society.
What breaks my heart the most is that these conversations begin so early for us. We have to tell
girls not to trust strangers, not to smile too freely or wander alone. We rarely pause to question
why these warnings have become an unquestioned part of growing up. Somewhere, we as a society have accepted that changing girls is easier than changing society.
Sexual abuse is often mentioned only after headlines appear on the frontpages. Yet its shadow stretches far beyond the crime itself. It lives in the woman who instinctively changes seats on a bus. It lives in the student who clutches her bag a little tighter. It lives in the daughter who lies to her parents that she has reached safely because she does not want them to worry. It lives in every mother who cannot sleep until she hears the latch on the front door click shut.
Violence does not merely injure the body. It rearranges the geography of a girl’s life. Perhaps the
greatest cruelty is not only what happens to the survivors but also the silence that follows. Moreoften than not, families fear gossip more than injustice.
Communities protect reputations more fiercely than their own children. Questions are raised on survivors but culprits are rarely questioned. And in that everlasting silence, another generation learns to hide that truth as speaking it can make one lonelier than enduring pain.
Oftentimes, I wonder what it would feel like to board a bus without having to scan every face and judge. To walk home after dusk without calculating every mishap. To enter a cab without memorising its number. These remain distant luxuries for countless women.
Perhaps this is the reason every incident of abuse hurts us all. It reminds us of the collective failure of society where we are still teaching young girls to navigate fear instead of eliminating it
from society.
The day a mother no longer needs to whisper, “Be careful” before her daughter steps outside, we will know that we have not merely made our roads safer. We have made our society kinder.
Until then, every such warning remains a quiet reminder that the childhood of too many girls is
interrupted not by age, but by fear.
(The author is a poet, columnist, and doctoral researcher. Feedback at: [email protected])
