Woman Finds Molester At Doorstep, Should Women Defend Themselves?

Imagine hearing the calling bell ring, and you are opening the door only to find your perpetrator standing at your doorstep. How frightening and traumatic would that be? Being a woman, just imagining myself in such a situation sends a chill down my spine. This really happened to a Mumbai-based woman on Sunday.

A woman who was molested on a local train and experienced insensitive treatment by police personnel when she went to file a complaint at a railway police chowki woke up on Sunday to find her molester at her doorstep.

Mumbai Woman Finds Molester At Doorstep

When the shocked woman asked how he found her address, the accused, who worked as a daily wage labourer, claimed "the police gave it to him" and demanded she withdraw the complaint. However, the Government Railway Police (GRP) stated that they didn’t provide any information and claimed that the accused could have accessed the address from the chargesheet served to him by the law. The terrified woman is now afraid to step out of her home and has opted for work from home option.

The woman was molested back on September 21, 2022, while she was travelling on the first-class ladies coach of a local train when the accused touched her inappropriately between Andheri and Jogeswari stations. When the woman approached the Andheri GRP chowki, she was asked why she had not beaten the perpetrator. A female officer had asked if the accused was her boyfriend.

After receiving an insensitive response, the woman shared the entire ordeal on X (formerly Twitter), following which the then GRP commissioner, Quaiser Khalid, formed an inquiry into the conduct of the police officials. The accused, identified as Biharilal Yadav, was arrested three days later.

However, this Sunday, Yadav, who had been out on bail, went to the woman’s house early in the morning in an inebriated state. When the woman’s mother asked him two to three times how he got their address, he consistently said that he got it from the police. The accused created a ruckus and demanded the woman withdraw the complaint, which led the residents of the society to gather. In order to make him leave, the woman’s father repeatedly assured him that they would withdraw the complaint.

The woman again took to X and narrated the incident. She said that there was no way he could have accessed the documents by reading them or searching the internet. She added that he was a homeless person. In a follow-up tweet, the woman said a high-ranking police official called her and spoke to her rudely for 10 minutes on jurisdiction—how her case was being handled by the GRP and not by the city police. She said the call was "distressing."

She further wrote that getting justice in this country depended on having a social media account with a significant number of followers, knowledge of the English language to reach the maximum number of people, and a smartphone with an internet connection just to "beg for basic safety on the app." The woman also added that the GRP never informed her about the chargesheet being filed or when the accused was released on bail.

The police officials have registered a non-cognisable complaint, intending to take preventive action against the accused and write to the GRP to cancel his bail.

With No Adequate Support, Should Women Defend Themselves?

While action is now being taken, why and how did this incident even happen? How cruel would it have been for the woman to be asked insensitive questions by police officials when she went to seek help? How could an alleged homeless man have had enough resources to access the woman’s address? This is a serious infringement on the survivor’s privacy and safety that raises concern about women’s safety all over the nation.

Is the police officials' insensitive comment, rude phone call, and failure to inform the survivor about the accused's bail indicating that women are left to defend themselves on their own? Do they have to resort to social media, narrate the crime that happened to them to the entire world, and beg for justice?

Women are encouraged to speak up against the crimes against them. But if this is the result, wouldn’t women feel discouraged from opening up? Won’t this push survivors deeper into a shell? It’s high time the law and system were redressed in order to ensure women’s safety. Until then, the sad reality is that women need to safeguard themselves and stand up for each other.

Suggested Reading: Rape Accused Out On Bail Arrested For Third Time For Kidnapping Survivor: Need For Sterner Laws!

Views expressed by the author are their own