Some blame films. Others point to video games. There is talk too of the manosphere spreading ideas of toxic masculinity.
The epidemic of violence by men and boys is ongoing and deeply entrenched. Each time there’s a particularly gruesome crime—a gangrape in a park, a body found dumped in a pond—there is a fresh bout of outrage, soon forgotten, until the next incident, when the cycle of hand-wringing begins all over again.
By now, it is clear that we are in the middle of a crisis of violent crimes committed by men and even very young boys.
I did not have the stomach to watch the video of the eight-year-old boy brutalising a six-year-old girl at their school in Panchkula, Haryana. The verbal description was gory enough. His neighbours say he was a regular kid who played with his friends and greeted the elders politely but, yes, spent an inordinate amount of time on his mother’s mobile phone.
The girl who suffered grievous injuries and was treated in Chandigarh, has returned home. She is understandably traumatized and does not want to go back to that school. Her family has also asked the Juvenile Justice Board to order the takedown of the videos of the attack, captured on the school’s CCTV.
The boy underwent a psychological examination at an observation home in Ambala and is back home on bail. Two teachers and the school principal have been suspended for negligence in leaving such young children unsupervised.
{{/usCountry}}The boy underwent a psychological examination at an observation home in Ambala and is back home on bail. Two teachers and the school principal have been suspended for negligence in leaving such young children unsupervised.
{{/usCountry}}On the same day, nearly 1,700 km away, in Anantapur, Andhra Pradesh, a 20-year-old man walks into the classroom of a 14-year-old girl who had turned down his advances. He is carrying an electric chainsaw and, in the attack that followed, grievously injures both her and her brave friend who tries to intervene. At the time of writing, the girl remains critical in a Bengaluru hospital where she was flown for treatment. Her friend is reported to be out of danger.
The man who committed the crime was shot in both legs allegedly while “trying to escape”. One of those legs has since been amputated from the knee.
Understanding the crisis
Many were quick to blame video games and films with Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s blockbusters Animal and Kabir Singh singled out for attack on social media. Vanga’s response was a long tweet: “When someone commits a heinous crime, the first response should be empathy and an attempt to understand the larger problem. Not finding a convenient scapegoat in cinema.”
There is a degree of dissembling here. The glorification of gore in films and the suggestion in Kabir Singh that that some amount of violence is acceptable, even inevitable, in love certainly contributes to the normalisation of violence.
But Vanga is also right about one thing. There is a “larger problem”.
“When a boy turns violent, it is easier to blame a film or video game than to confront the culture of masculinity, entitlement and aggression that surrounds him,” said author Shivani Sibal whose new book Moms is just out.
Kumkum Kumar, a director at Breakthrough India, a non-profit dedicated to changing gender norms added: “We bring up girls with care for their protection but boys face no restrictions and are being brought up with a sense of entitlement and privilege which is now being fuelled by the digital space.”
The numbers speak for themselves. For 2024, the National Crime Records Bureau recorded a total of 34,878 cases for all crimes involving juveniles, an increase of 11.2% over the previous year. Boys and young men accounted for over 80% of offences.
As a society, we endorse the idea that “boys will be boys” and bring them up to be dominant and tough. Boys are growing up in an environment saturated with violence—not just in films and video games, but everywhere. In schools and on playgrounds where peer pressure and bullying thrive, and in homes. A boy who experiences violence is more likely to perpetrate it as an adult. A boy who sees his mother being abused by his father is more likely to become a violent husband himself.
A 2023 study of 5,573 married men in India aged 15-29 found that close to 17% admitted to perpetrating physical intimate partner violence in the preceding 12 months; 48% of these men said they had been beaten by their parents as children, and a third had seen their fathers abuse their mothers.
Breaking the cycle
If the post-2012 Delhi gang-rape years have taught us one thing, it is this: Behavioural change is possible and can happen in a relatively short time.study
Female aspiration is surging whether on the sports field, where they are excelling, or in the classroom, where there is near-total gender parity in school enrolment.
Hitherto unheard-of conversations are now mainstream. The burden of household care work on women that keeps them away from the workforce. Menopause. The gender gap in medical care.
Nearly 80% of girls and women aged 15-24 now use hygienic methods of menstrual protection, up from 57.6% in 2015-16, finds the National Family Health Survey.
Very young children are more likely to know about good touch and bad touch. This year, we finally agreed after decades of resistance, that sexuality education must be a part of school curriculums.
But even as we celebrate these successes, we must ask: Where are the boys? If we are teaching girls to be aspirational, ambitious and mindful of their bodily protection, what is the message to the boys? Nothing? No rules apply to them? Only that they must be tough, strong and provide for their families?
Fortunately, civil society organisations such as Cequin and Breakthrough have taken up the responsibility of that desperately-needed conversation. Cequin has enrolled male influencers on social media for its Mardon wali baat to talk about the meaning of masculinity and Breakthrough has devised an adolescent curriculum, now being implemented in 28,137 schools in six states, to build an understanding of personal boundaries, safe and unsafe touch, respect for personal space, and handling disappointment and rejection, said Kumar. “We’ve seen that three things drive male aggression—when there is peer pressure, rejection and bullying.”
There are micro efforts that can easily be scaled up. Gaali Band Abhiyan, is a small Gorakhpur-based NGO with one mission: To end abuse, because so much of it is gendered around mothers and sisters.
Several schools have begun talking to kids from a very young age about consent and respect. But, said Kumar, you cannot limit it to a weekly class. The ideas of equality, dignity and equal rights have to run through the curriculum and be reflected in textbooks across subjects and disciplines.
We have, post 2012, enacted tough laws and fast-track courts and pink police and even the death sentence. And yet, we’ve stopped short of marriage equality, rolled back transgender rights, and refused to recognise the criminality of marital rape. Violence cannot be seen in silos. Rape by a stranger could result in a prison term for him. But the same crime by a husband is not even an offence.
We have invested heavily in punishing violence, but far too little in preventing boys from learning it in the first place. All the work and effort will amount to little unless we first give the beast in our midst a name. It is patriarchy.