We know her name. We know her age. We know which street she lived on, which school she attended, what she was wearing. We have dissected her life, her family’s grief, her trauma — frame by frame — across every television channel and every social media feed.

We do not know his face.

That is where I want you to pause. Right there. In that gap — that enormous, telling, deeply shameful gap — lives everything that is wrong with how we as a society respond to rape.

The victim becomes the story. The perpetrator becomes a footnote. A case number. An “accused” hidden behind the thick procedural curtain of a legal system that was designed, we are told, to protect the innocent — but which, in practice, has become a sanctuary for the guilty.

Let us talk about what the numbers actually say. Not because numbers capture the truth of this crime — they cannot — but because they reveal the scale of our collective failure with a clarity that no amount of editorial outrage has managed to produce.

The Data — because the numbers demand to be heard:

• India, NCRB 2024: 29,536 cases of rape reported. That is 80 reported cases every single day. And the word “reported” is doing enormous heavy lifting in that sentence — independent research suggests that over 99% of rapes in India go unreported, buried under the twin weight of social stigma and fear of retaliation.
• Of children: In 2024, 784 registered rape victims were under 18 years of age. Under the POCSO Act in 2021 alone, 52,836 cases of sexual offenses against minor girls were filed. Children. In their own homes, their own schools, their own neighborhoods.
• Conviction rate: India’s conviction rate in rape cases hovers between 27% and 32%. In Delhi — the city that shook the nation with the Nirbhaya case in 2012 — the acquittal rate in rape cases stands at a staggering 83%. In Karnataka, in 2023, of cases disposed of by courts, 92% ended in acquittals.
• Court pendency: As of recent data, 95% of all crimes against women cases are pending trial. Justice delayed is not merely justice denied — in rape cases, it is a second assault on the survivor, drawn out across years.
• The accused meanwhile? He returns home. He continues his life. In many cases, he is known to the victim — a neighbour, a relative, a person in a position of trust. He is not paraded. He is not named in most media coverage. He is protected, procedurally and socially, in ways the victim never was and never will be.

This is not an accident of the system. It is a feature of it.

Turn on any news channel after a high-profile rape case. Watch carefully. The camera will linger on the family of the victim — their devastation weaponized for viewership. The reporter will stand outside the hospital, outside the home, outside the court — and every question, every frame, every graphic will orbit the survivor. Her identity. Her background. Her movements on the night in question.

The rapist’s family will not be followed. His neighborhood will not be mapped. His history of behaviour will not be investigated and broadcast in prime time. He will not have to live the rest of his life as a figure of public shame — because the media has decided, consciously or not, that the victim is the more compelling story. Sensation sells. Suffering sells. A family broken sells. A predator exposed and humiliated? That is apparently less interesting.

This must change. And the change must be structural, not sentimental.

What the world has done — and what we refuse to consider:

Several countries have decided, through law and through will, that a rapist forfeits his standing as a protected citizen.

• Bangladesh passed the Women and Children Repression Prevention (Amendment) Bill in 2020, introducing the death penalty for rape following mass public outrage over high-profile cases.
• Pakistan introduced the death penalty for gang rape and child sexual abuse in 2020. Chemical castration is an additional sentencing option.
• Saudi Arabia mandates death by public beheading for convicted rapists under Sharia law. Egypt, Iran, the UAE and China have similar provisions for aggravated rape, particularly involving minors.
• North Korea sentences rapists to death by firing squad.

One does not have to admire the legal systems of these countries in their entirety to acknowledge the singular clarity of their message: this act places you outside the protection of civil society.

India, meanwhile, has the Nirbhaya Fund — announced in 2013, still largely unspent a decade later. It has fast-track courts — chronically understaffed and overwhelmed. It has the POCSO Act — routinely delayed in its application. It has laws. It has frameworks. It has committees. What it does not have is the will to make the punishment so swift, so certain, and so visible that it functions as a genuine deterrent rather than a bureaucratic inconvenience.

The argument against capital punishment is not without intellectual weight. There are serious, principled objections — the risk of wrongful conviction, the question of whether the state should hold the power of death, the evidence on deterrence. These arguments deserve a hearing in Parliament and in academic institutions. They are not arguments that should be used to endlessly delay action while children are being assaulted and survivors are being re-traumatized in courtrooms for years on end.

There is a middle ground that India has not seriously explored: mandatory, time-bound trials — completed within ninety days for rape cases. Automatic public identification of convicted rapists — their names, their photographs, their backgrounds published as a matter of public record. Constitutional amendment to classify rape, particularly of minors, as a crime against the state — not merely against the individual — triggering a fundamentally different order of response from the justice system.

The rapist should be the story. His face should be known. His family should have to reckon with what he has done. The community that sheltered him, that looked away, that whispered about the girl rather than condemning the man, should be made uncomfortable in the full light of public scrutiny.

Because here is the truth that our system refuses to confront: the victim did not choose this. He did. Every protection, every procedural courtesy, every anonymous news report that shields his identity is a choice — a choice we make, again and again, to protect the wrong person.

A child who was violated does not get to remain anonymous in her own memory. The very least a just society can do is ensure that the man who violated her cannot remain anonymous in ours.

We pour our outrage into candlelight vigils and hashtags that trend for forty-eight hours, then we move on — so I ask you plainly: how many more names do we need to remember before we decide that the one name we should never be allowed to forget is his?

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