Moral Policing Incidents Expose Gaps in Women's Safety Laws

The Indian Constitution guarantees equality under Article 14 and permits the State to make special protective provisions for women and children under Article 15(3). Article 21 guarantees the right to life and personal liberty, which the Supreme Court has read to include personal autonomy and privacy in K.S. Puttaswamy v Union of India (2017). These guarantees exist alongside a long social history in which women's mobility, choice of company, and clothing have been treated as matters for family and community control rather than individual decision, often justified in the language of tradition and honour.

Moral policing in India has repeatedly surfaced as vigilante groups or mobs taking it upon themselves to enforce these unwritten codes, sometimes through public shaming and sometimes through physical or sexual violence. Legislative responses to violence against women and children have grown over time: the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012 was enacted specifically to protect minors from sexual exploitation and abuse, following recognition that existing criminal law did not adequately address child-specific vulnerabilities. The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013, following the Justice Verma Committee recommendations after the 2012 Delhi gang-rape case, further strengthened provisions on sexual offences against women.

Despite this legal architecture, the persistence of moral policing shows that formal rights on paper do not automatically translate into lived freedom in public spaces. This gap between constitutional guarantee and social practice is central to understanding why incidents of vigilante violence against young couples continue to occur even where laws explicitly criminalise such conduct.