Is India Safe For Solo Female Travelers?

That all may be true. Admittedly, I’ve never been to India, and can’t give you any on-the-ground first-hand reporting of exactly what it’s like to navigate the country’s culture or customs. I do know that it’s on most young and worldly female travelers’ bucket lists. I also know that most of them are ill-prepared for the realities of what traveling to such a country with different social expectations, boundaries (or lack thereof), and standards of safety entails.

Don’t take it from me, take it from the numerous bright-eyed and bushy-tailed women travelers who embarked on their own naive adventure to India intending to emerge more cultured, only to return feeling distraught, violated, and dehumanized. If that’s not good enough for you, take it from Indians themselves, who don’t mince their words on online travel forums and viral videos about women’s safety in the country. Their advice is simple, yet authoritative — do not come to India alone as a woman, and if you do, be prepared for unsavory things to happen.

Listen to Other Women Who Have Traveled to India

Travel YouTuber Phoebe Lee (Travel For Phoebe) recently uploaded a video reporting on her solo trip through India. Her experience was all too familiar: vlog your experience, cut out all the bad parts, gaslight yourself into believing your negative gut feelings about safety are all in your head, blame yourself for any feelings of discomfort, and keep pushing on like nothing is wrong. Lee recalled initially cutting out any inappropriate behavior she encountered from her Indian vlogs, but after experiencing unrelenting sexual harassment, stalking, and a total disregard for her consent (including taking photos of her, swarming around her, and even chasing after her) in various regions, she decided to make a truthful video unpacking her entire experience. It wasn’t pretty. Her experiences ranged from someone attempting a break-in to her room at night and hotel staff ignoring her safety concerns to drivers repeatedly ignoring her boundaries and Indian men on the street violating her space by swarming her for photos and sprinting after her in packs as they repeatedly ignored her desperately yelling “no” and “stop.” 

At one point, a crowd of men encircled her, encroaching in her space to take photos of her despite her cries to stop and blocking her face. It gets to the point that she has to ask her guide for help and after some bickering between him and the group of men swarming her, she recalled feeling like an object owned by him, whose bargaining with the other men was paramount because her own voice and her refusal didn’t meaning anything on its own — it only matters if she’s perceived to already belong to someone else.

While the guide helped her escape the situation, the men began trailing behind them on the road, following their car and driving recklessly, hanging out the windows with their phones out. Listening to her story, I was shocked by how much worse it continued to get, how scary and intimidating the circumstances were, and how many times she fought a mental war with herself, despite being desperate to leave. Lee recounts having constant thoughts about leaving, but kept rationalizing them away. “When you’re in these situations by yourself, your mind starts to do funny things,” she explains, “Oh, maybe it’s not that bad, maybe I’m being dramatic, maybe I’m being self-centered and egotistical, maybe they are curious, maybe it’s okay, maybe it’ll get better.” Her experience is shocking, but it is anything but uncommon. Many women fear being perceived as ignorant or racist for speaking up about a negative experience in a foreign culture, or facing harassment from the country’s locals. 

Sexual Violence Against Women in India Is a Major Concern

In 2012, the brutal gang rape of 23-year-old student physiotherapist Jyoti Singh on a moving New Delhi bus shocked the nation. Gang raped by four men and tortured with a medal pipe, intestines pulled out, and dumped on the side of the road along with her male companion to be left for dead, the barbarism of the crime shocked the nation. Singh succumbed to her injuries about two weeks later in a Singapore hospital, inspiring a wave of infuriated protestors who took to the streets to place pressure on law enforcement to address rising cases of sexual violence against women. 

Six men were arrested, including the bus driver and a 17-year-old juvenile. The juvenile was sentenced to three years in a reform facility, the maximum punishment for a juvenile. The bus driver, Ram Singh, and the remaining four adult perpetrators were arrested. Singh’s body was found hanged in his jail cell, and the remaining men were sentenced to death by hanging. The case resulted in stronger punishments for rape as well as broadening the definition for what constitutes rape, and fast-track courts were set up across the country to ensure speedy trials for sexual offenses. The crime also resulted in a new Juvenile Justice Act in 2015 which permits juveniles aged 16 to 18 to be tried as adults for heinous crimes. However, women’s advocates don’t believe enough has been done to address the profound underlying issues throughout Indian society.

Around the 2012 attack, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) recorded up to 25,000 annual rape cases across India, but that number has only gone up, peaking at 40,000 annually in 2016 (43.2% of which were minors) and presently plateauing at around 30,000. You might wonder, then, why India is often characterized as a “rape culture” if their reported figures for rape and sexual assault against women are lower than that of the United States, despite their considerably larger population. This is, in part, due to the stigma surrounding the reporting of sexual assault and a palpable lack of trust in law enforcement resulting in underreporting. According to the NCRB, conviction rates for rape between 2018-2022 were only 27-28%. 

Collecting accurate data concerning the true rate of sexual assault and rape is notoriously tricky in any country around the world. There will always be some discrepancy between the number of reports and the real rate of assaults. Out of any number of reports, some proportion of them could be false claims, and some proportion will have gone unreported. There’s also differences in collecting and categorizing data, combined with different cultural understandings of crimes. In India, marital rape is not recognized as a crime (so long as a man’s wife is at least 18 years old) and the age of consent was only raised from 16 to 18 in 2013.

You also need to factor in problematic attitudes regarding appropriate behavior and manipulation of the law obscuring legality and morality. In 2021, a petition signed by thousands of people demanded that India's Chief Justice Sharad Arvind Bobde resign after he suggested that a schoolgirl's rapist should marry her as a proposed compromise solution so the offender could avoid jail and losing his job. If a top judge feels comfortable making these statements in public, you have to wonder how prevalent the problem is. It certainly lends credence to widespread claims that victims are regularly subjected to sexist treatment at the hands of police and courts. Such archaic practices include, but aren’t limited to the “two finger test” — an exam performed by a medical practitioner, often by court order in a rape case, to determine if a woman was sexually active through an invasive and traumatizing examination to search for the presence of a hymen as well as size and laxity of the vagina. 

This test is not only scientifically invalid, but reinforces sexist ideas about how “loose women” can’t be victims of rape. While it’s since been widely discredited, condemned, and outlawed by the Supreme Court in 2013, there have been incidents as recent as 2020 documenting their continued practice. One such incident includes subjecting female employees of the Surat Municipal Corporation to this humiliating and previously barred practice under the guise of a routine (and mandatory) fitness test. Other complaints include a series of reports of women being inappropriately ordered to strip to determine which women were menstruating after finding a used sanitary pad to determine who it could belong to. India is no stranger to subjecting women to antiquated, sexist practices. 

One such horrifying cases was the gang rape and murder of an 8-year-old Muslim girl by a group of Hindu men who sought to intimidate and strike fear in the Muslim comunity in the area so that they would flee. Three men, including a police officer, received a life sentence for raping Asifa Bano for several days, bludgeoning her to death, and dumping her body. Out of eight suspects, four were police officers and one was a retired government official. The corruption of police was scandalous, not only participating in the rape and murder of an innocent 8-year-old girl, but destroying evidence, which resulted in another three policemen receiving five years in prison. One police officer involved in the search party sent to look for Asifa when her family reported her missing was one of the men who took part in kidnapping her and had intimate knowledge of the gruesome plan. It was later revealed that police also took bribes to keep the situation under wraps. Activists say the government is apathetic towards sexual abuse and have created a culture of impunity in India.

Senior criminal lawyer Rebecca M. Jon, speaking with Reuters, explained that judges may have some reluctance in convicting as a result of the recently implemented tougher sentences involving life sentences without remission or even the death penalty. She thinks one factor is "the absence of the fear of the law.” She told Reuters, "There is no consistent application of the law, that's one aspect. There is very poor policing, that's another aspect."

The complexity of convicting rapists while giving them a fair trial has remained a hot topic in recent years, especially in the West, which has the opposite problem — a culture that places too much faith in accusations over evidence, at least in the broader culture (thankfully the law still protects the presumption of innocence). India’s conviction rate for rape, however, stands curiously low compared to Western nations. While Nirbhaya is one of the most famous cases in the nation’s recent history, it’s hardly an isolated incident, the most recent of which happened to a trainee doctor who fell asleep at work after a 36-hour shift at an Indian government hospital. Hoping to get some rest in a vacant seminar room designated for on-duty doctors to get some shut-eye, she was viciously raped and murdered, sparking more widespread protests 12 years after Nirbhaya. 

India doesn’t just have low conviction rates for sexual crimes, but patriarchal attitudes put much of the onus on the woman rather than the man, for falling victim to sexual crimes. Pew Research polled Indian concerns about rape in India two years after the infamous gang rape in New Delhi. Nine out of ten answered rape is a “very big problem” in India, and eight in ten (82%) said the problem was growing. Regarding punitive measures, 74% of Indians said Indian laws were too liberal concerning punishing rapists and 78% believe the country's police are at fault for not being strict enough in investigating rape cases.

Violence Against Women in India

Indian women have plenty of reasons to live in fear, not least because when they’re not scared of being sexually assaulted or raped, they fear their risk of unprovoked violence. The NCRB saw an 87% rise in crimes against women over ten years between 2011 and 2021, with most in the latter year classified as "cruelty by husband or his relatives" and assault. From a recent article in The New York Times, "For a country desperate to be seen as a global leader, repeated high-profile cases of brutal sexual assaults highlight an uncomfortable truth: India, by many measures, remains one of the world's most unsafe places for women. Rape and domestic violence are relatively common, and conviction rates are low." 

Rates of violence against women have been on a consistent rise, save for 2020, when the world shut down in widespread lockdowns due to COVID-19. Experts suggest that the pandemic impacted India’s data collection. 2021 saw the highest number of crimes against women on record. Of the six million crimes recorded by Indian police throughout the year, 428,278 of them involved crimes against women, up from 338,954 in 2016. That's an increase of 26.35% over six years. The majority of these crimes were kidnappings and abduction, rapes, domestic violence, dowry deaths and assaults. Some of these crimes are incredibly violent, like the 107 women who were attacked with acid.

Women’s Agency & Safety Is Limited By Patriarchy

In a 2018 documentary by The Quint on Indian attitudes towards rape, numerous Indian men uttered the phrase “it takes two to clap” — the implication being that women often bring rape upon themselves via their clothing, carelessness, or for leading men on. Men weren’t alone when it came to perpetuating these attitudes concerning women’s responsibility for sexual purity. Per BBC, India has earned the moniker "the rape capital of the world" largely because of its treatment of victims, who are reportedly stigmatized by the society and shamed by the police and judiciary.

Other widespread problems in India include child marriage. Despite 2013 legislation outlawing the practice, it remains a widespread practice, especially in rural areas. UNICEF data reveals that India accounts for 1 in 3 of the world's child brides (classified as any woman married under 18, and any man under 21 years old) and 23% (almost 1 in 4) young Indian women have been married or in union before their 18th birthday. While child marriage has greatly reduced in recent years, critics remain skeptical of the official figures, because the illegality of the practice may lead to underreporting in census data which is collected by the government.

Child marriage in India is largely driven by poverty, limited access to education, and gender inequality, and persists due to women’s marginalized status in society. Women are often seen as financial burdens, incentivizing poor families to marry off their young daughters, often in exchange for dowries. A dowry is the practice of a bride's family providing a payment in the form of property or money to the groom or the groom's family upon marriage. Despite the practice being illegal in India, an estimated 40 to 50% of female homicides are over dowry disputes, representing a stable trend across 1999 to 2016, per a United Nations report.

Cultural Differences

The barriers faced by Indian women are a brutal pill to swallow. The combination of India’s patriarchal culture and the exoticism of foreigners leads to an uncomfortable slurry of lack of boundaries and potential for invasive interactions.

It isn’t unusual for Indians to get excited at the prospect of seeing Western tourists, due to the homogeneity of the country and lack of exposure to foreigners. You may notice they stare, follow you around like you’re a celebrity, requesting photos, or even touching you. This may happen to men as well, but women often voice feeling overly sexualized, ogled, groped, and generally unsafe as a result of these lack of boundaries. Some of this behavior could be an innocent misunderstanding of different cultural norms: it isn’t necessarily rude, but an indication of curiosity, to stare in India. The country’s collectivist culture and high population density also means Indians don’t have the same values concerning privacy and personal space. This can result in unintentional infringements on personal boundaries.

Taking photos with foreigners, something that’s considered rare, much like running into a celebrity, is considered a status symbol or a way to memorialize something novel. If you stand out with blonde hair and porcelain skin because you look so different, you may attract more attention and people may feel a higher incentive to mingle with you. Some even reportedly believe taking a selfie with a white tourist will bring them luck. If you do decide to visit, be wary of how you dress in India. In a culture that conflates women’s modesty with their sexual purity, showing too much skin may communicate the wrong message or worse, put you in danger. Indians aren’t accustomed to seeing women showing a lot of skin, and ideas about Western women being “easy” can lead to unwanted interactions. 

The concerning prevalence of violence against women in India should put you on high alert. If you aren’t prepared for the dangers of traveling across India alone, you shouldn’t even consider it. Do your research before traveling to any region alone, and do put stock in the anecdotes of other female travelers who have traveled to the same destination. If hundreds of videos and articles pop up online insisting that women feel unsafe, don’t dismiss it in the hopes of proving how worldly and well traveled you are. Always listen to your gut if something feels wrong. There’s no pride in putting yourself in danger for some Instagram street cred.