Meghana Saud
Sun, 25 October 2026
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Meghana Saud
Sun, 25 October 2026
Evenings and nightlife are a delight in our city, with restaurants, clubs, and tea shops alive and bustling with people. However, the underlying social implications of the population usually seen during these times invite a question: are public spaces actually ‘public’ or are there rules about who gets to own them?
WHO reports that almost 840 million women globally have been subjected to physical or sexual violence, and the figure remains unchanged. When an act of sexual violence occurs in a public space, the response rarely ever questions why our infrastructure fails to protect half of the population. Instead, society demands to know why she was out that late and why the victim chose to present herself out in public in a certain way that supposedly ‘entices’ other people. These designations indicate that while men own the public space, as a privilege of patriarchy, women borrow these spaces and are required to present a performance to exist safely.
Gender-role theory holds that society is divided into two realms: the private sphere and the public sphere. The private sphere has been historically assigned to women, consequential of women's oppression, while the public sphere has been owned by men. Sexual violence and street harassment are deliberate mechanisms to reinforce this idea and establish spatial control. By making public spaces unsafe through failed control of criminal behaviour and emphasis on incorrect social practices, society maintains a hierarchy where men command both the public square and the family estate, while women must carefully perform and negotiate for their right to exist in either.
The spatial exclusion extends to the private sphere as well. In traditional Nepali society, the practice of patrilocal marriage requires a woman to leave her origins and relocate to her husband’s ancestral home. This cultural expectation uproots a woman’s safety networks. In her new household, a bride is treated as a newcomer who must adapt to unfamiliar family dynamics, without local allies or physical sanctuary nearby. This collectively indicates how a woman’s space is never hers, but controlled by external norms, values and expectations.
The recent rape of a seventeen-year-old student at Aastha Kunj Park in Delhi led to a policy restricting access to parks after dark, while the root cause of the issue, which is the sickening mentality that women are not ‘allowed’ to exist in a safe space just because they stepped out at dark, remains undiscussed. Decisions like these have roots in various other facets such as religion, blind faith in culture and deeply internalised misogyny. However, it is important to ensure that the justice system addresses such issues with sensitivity toward the victim and strictness toward the offenders. True equality requires and demands spatial justice.
Justice means prioritising punishment for offenders, gender-responsive urban planning such as installing reliable street lighting, expanding safe public transit and designing inclusive infrastructures where everyone has the right to pause and gather as part of the community, without having to worry about their safety. Culturally, it requires rethinking traditions that treat a woman’s origin, root, and autonomy as negotiable or compromisable. While valuing collectivism, it is significant to value an individual’s choices, decisions and beliefs, without limiting their opportunities to explore themselves as humans.
Until we rebuild our city infrastructures, justice system and reform social expectations, half of Nepal’s and the world’s population will remain perpetual guests, waiting to belong. We must stop treating a woman’s deviance as a bigger crime than sexual and physical violence.
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