The question of Jammu and Kashmir’s reckoning with sexual violence becomes particularly painful when the victims are children. On August 10, police in Bandipora reported the alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl and arrested two accused within hours. Around the same time, Baramulla police arrested two men after a 21-year-old woman alleged gang-rape. In Kishtwar, a government-school principal has been accused of repeatedly sexually abusing a minor tribal student, who became pregnant and died after being taken for an abortion. The case has triggered protests and an ongoing investigation.
These are allegations under investigation and must be treated as such. But their weight does not depend on sensationalism. That children can be violated within places meant to protect them is itself a profound question for society.
Betrayal of Trust Beyond Legal Framework
A child has neither the social power nor the psychological maturity of an adult, and so depends on adults for protection. When that dependence is betrayed, the crime is not only against a body. Rather, it is an assault on the architecture of trust through which childhood becomes possible. Children learn the world through relationships. Parents, teachers, and relatives become their first representatives of safety. When one such relationship turns into exploitation, a child may stop encountering the world as a place of trust and start encountering it as one requiring permanent suspicion.
This is why rape cannot be understood only through the vocabulary of criminal law. Law asks whether an offence occurred and what punishment should follow. Philosophy asks a harder question: what happens when one person refuses to recognise another as an autonomous being? Sexual violence is an extreme expression of power over another person's body and will. It denies the victim the right to determine what happens to her own existence. It is not simply a physical crime, but it is a violation of personhood.
This distinction matters because how a society understands a crime shapes how it responds to it. If rape is seen merely as an unfortunate act by a deviant individual, the solution is arrest and punishment alone. While these steps are necessary, they don't explain why victim-blaming persists, why families hesitate to report, why children remain vulnerable inside the very institutions meant to protect them, or why conversations about safety so often become conversations about restricting women.
Perpetrators capable of cruelty have always existed. The more crucial question is whether the surrounding society lets that cruelty stay hidden, and whether victims can speak without fear.
While the recent cases of sexual violence reveal the vulnerability of women and girl-child, the Kishtwar case is particularly troubling precisely because the allegations involve someone in a position of institutional authority. An educational institution is also a moral one. A teacher does not merely transmit information but holds a position of trust. When that authority is abused, the damage outlives the individual victim. It weakens a child's faith in institutions. The same applies to families, religious bodies and community structures. The greater the trust placed in someone, the greater the responsibility that trust demands.
Abuse of the Flawed Framing of Rape Discourse
A disturbing inversion often follows such cases. Questions about where she went, whom she met, what she wore, why she trusted someone or why she did not resist can sometimes become more prominent than the fundamental question of why another person believed he had the right to violate her. Someone else's freedom to move, speak or trust is not permission to violate them.
The reality is that the victim ends up explaining and being held responsible for the crime committed against her.
The language of honour makes this worse. Kashmir, like many traditional societies, places great weight on family reputation but sexual violence exposes the gap between honour as appearance and honour as moral courage. When a family worries more about what people will say than about what the survivor has suffered, reputation has been placed above humanity. A victim does not dishonour her family by being targeted. The dishonour belongs to the violence itself, and to those who commit, enable or conceal it.
There is also a temptation to turn suffering into passing spectacle. A case makes headlines, anger rises online, statements are issued, and attention moves on. The survivor's life does not move on with the news cycle. For her, the crime can remain present long after sensationalism fades. Outrage matters only when it produces institutional memory and real change. Otherwise, it is just another form of forgetting.
Kashmir should also resist building its entire understanding of sexual violence around sensational cases. It would be irresponsible to claim an unprecedented rise without reliable data. Reported cases can increase because offences increase, because victims report more, or because access to institutions improves. Similarly, declining figures don't guarantee that violence itself has declined. The honest response is neither exaggeration nor minimisation, but investigation, measurement and listening.
Statistics have their limits. Even if case numbers were small, no individual victim would matter less for it. Human dignity cannot be reduced to arithmetic. Numbers measure frequency, not the worth of the person who suffered. Percentages and rates offer a comfortable distance from suffering. Responsibility begins exactly where that distance ends. A minor girl is not merely a case count. She is a person whose sense of trust and safety may be permanently altered by what was done to her.
Much of the conventional discussion surrounding women's safety asks women to modify their behaviour. They are told to return early, avoid certain places, remain cautious, and constantly calculate danger. Practical safety measures can certainly be useful, but they cannot become the philosophical solution to sexual violence.
A society in which women must permanently restrict their freedom because some men may violate them has not solved the problem of violence. It has simply transferred the cost of male misconduct onto women.
Gearing up Justice System and Ending Toxic Masculinity
The deeper responsibility lies in cultivating a different idea of masculinity that is built on self-control and recognition of another person's autonomy, rather than the ability to impose one's will. Strength, in this sense, is not the power to dominate but the capacity to govern oneself. A man who respects another's freedom does not need surveillance to behave morally; his restraint comes from conscience, not fear.
This is also why prevention cannot be left entirely to the criminal justice system. Law acts after a boundary is crossed. Moral education shapes the consciousness that exists before it. Families, schools and communities need to treat consent, bodily autonomy and respect as ordinary principles, not foreign legal concepts.
The state's responsibility, though, remains fundamental. The swift arrests in Bandipora show why prompt police action matters. Every delay can deepen a victim's vulnerability. But justice does not end with an arrest. It requires credible investigation, protection for the survivor, due process for the accused, and meaningful punishment where guilt is established. A society loses its legitimacy when it abandons victims or turns legal process into arbitrary punishment.
The Reckoning After the Crime
What Kashmir needs, then, is not periodic outrage but a shift in moral consciousness. It needs families that value protection over reputation, schools that treat safeguarding as part of education, institutions that take complaints seriously, communities that refuse to stigmatise survivors, and men who understand that dignity begins where entitlement ends.
A society is not defined only by the crimes that occur within it, but by what it does afterward - whom it believes, whom it protects, whom it holds accountable, and whether it has the courage to examine itself.
The real question is not simply whether rape cases in Kashmir are rising, but whether collective awareness is rising fast enough to confront them. Kashmir cannot preserve its identity by merely invoking honour, modesty, spirituality or tradition. Those words mean something only when translated into the protection of human dignity.
The opposite of violence is not just punishment. It is a culture in which another person's dignity becomes so deeply sacred that violating it is unthinkable.
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