Indian women are on the streets again. Everything has changed but nothing has changed

September has seen an avalanche of reported attacks against women and girls. I use the word “reported” because there is always more violence than is reported at any time and private violence tends to be invisibilised.

I want to write. To say something. I stare at my computer screen. Nothing. I try sitting with a pen and paper but the paper stays blank. What do I even write that someone, perhaps even I, have not said before?

It seems impossible that in 2026 we are still having the same conversations and the context is, if anything, more misogynist than when we started out a three-year project researching women’s access to public space in 2003.

We were not the only ones asking questions about gendered public space. On this journey we met Jasmeen Patheja, student at the Shrishti School of Design working on street sexual harassment, a project titled Blank Noise, a project that became a campaign. With her, we staged an intervention on the streets following the rape perpetrated by a police constable on Marine Drive in 2005.

Thousands of women gathered at Delhi University’s North Campus after the alleged gangrape of a 17-year-old girl.

“The system is literally rotten to the core,” said one student, recounting her friend’s experience of alleged harassment by...

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