It is always the girl’s fault. To have a court in Delhi lecture guardians of adolescent girls on this assumption is nothing short of painful. It is bad enough that society is always eager to assume, after years of campaigns on women’s rights and status, that if a girl is molested or raped, she is in some way responsible. But when a court, in the process of finding a man not guilty of rape, feels that guardians of young girls should monitor their wards’ behaviour and counsel them so that they do not stray, the gravity and scale of society’s belittling perceptions about women have to be re-examined. A Delhi court found Vikas Kumar innocent of raping a girl of Class IX, and his parents innocent of kidnapping and wrongful confinement. The case had surfaced in 2005, and had run a confusingly twisted course since then. The alleged victim had complained to the police that she had been raped by Kumar, and then kidnapped and forced to marry him. The complaint apparently came months after the event. She now has a child, and has said that she was not held against her will in Kumar’s house, but stayed there of her own accord. She has betrayed her own cause, and is being accused of having complained only when she had been deserted by the Kumars. And that she is singing a different tune because she now wants to keep her marriage alive.

It is a pitiful little story, concealing within its jerky connections side-stories of exploitations, misunderstandings, mental and physical violence, and vulnerability of a terrifying kind. It is not the court’s judgment that is worrying — the girl herself has changed her former position — but the fact that the judiciary should feel it is the parents’ duty to control their daughters. It is only the girl or woman whose “conduct” has to be monitored, the rightness of the conduct consisting of not “straying” through temptation, a momentary emotion or feeling of romance. It does not take a genius to see that the staggering level of gender-bias in this attitude is actually the cause of the suffering and helplessness that certainly underlie the story. The opacity of the case is an indicator of all that remains unexpressed: the tragedy, repeated in numerous young lives, that links the original complaint and the complainant’s subsequent retreat. Sensitiveness to misery might have helped. But where the premise is the girl’s culpability, it is futile to hope for even that.