The Checklist…
“They all are the same.
You need to be safe,” they said.
Two days before my 20th birthday,
the news of a girl in Delhi,
only a few years older than me,
was everywhere.
She had succumbed to horrific violence.
The country protested.
People took to the streets.
They demanded justice.
Accountability.
And perhaps for the first time,
I began to understand
what all those warnings around me meant.
That being a girl
came with a certain kind of fear.
I had heard stories before.
Read the news before.
But as a child,
I don’t think I understood
the depth of any of it.
What I understood were the instructions.
Be aware of your surroundings.
Stay alert. Come home before dark.
I broke the rules. Went out at night.
My parents would get pissed.
I never understood why.
Maybe I was naïve. Maybe stubborn.
Maybe I simply didn’t know the world yet.
They did.
And as I grew older, the instructions grew with me.
Carry pepper spray.
Carry something sharp.
Be careful, even in broad daylight.
My parents stayed on the phone
when I took an auto late at night.
Aunts and uncles told me
which streets to take,
which ones to avoid,
whom to watch,
when to turn around.
Even a quick trip
to the grocery store nearby
after dark
meant one of my brothers
would come with me.
The streets I had grown up on
now came with instructions.
But there was something else
the checklist never really explained.
Most of the warnings
were about the outside.
Strangers.
Dark streets.
Empty roads.
Men I didn’t know.
But what about inside the house?
What about the people
we already know?
Relatives.
Family friends.
People we grow up around.
People we are taught to respect,
trust, sometimes even obey.
Why were there so many instructions
for walking down a street alone,
but so few
for what to do
when discomfort came
from someone familiar?
Why was I taught
to be suspicious of a stranger,
but not that I was allowed
to question someone I knew?
To move away.
To say no.
To tell someone.
To trust the feeling
that something wasn’t right
even if the person making me uncomfortable
was someone everyone else trusted?
Maybe because
the stranger was easier to warn me about.
The danger outside the house
was easier to name.
The danger that could exist within
was much harder
to talk about.
And I kept wondering:
Why am I being taught how to conduct myself?
What about the behavior
that makes all these precautions necessary?
What about education? Intervention? Accountability? Consequences?
And I kept wondering:
Why am I being taught how to conduct myself?
What about the behavior
that makes all these precautions necessary?
What about education? Intervention? Accountability? Consequences?
Then came the corporate world.
The Me Too movement was in full swing.
There were policies to protect female employees.
Precautions with cabs.
Precautions with male colleagues.
Precautions with working hours.
My company wouldn’t let a female employee
work beyond 8:30 PM.
Again, I understood why. But again, I wondered:
Why does safety so often mean
restricting the person
who might be harmed?
Why couldn’t I work late
if my work required it?
Why should getting into the office cab
after my shift feel like a calculated risk?
In my late twenties,
I moved to another country.
I thought, perhaps, safety would feel different.
But the precautions followed.
If anything, there were more of them.
Different country.
Different streets.
Same warnings.
Same questions.
Why is the person at risk
so often expected to carry the burden
of preventing what someone else
might choose to do?
Where are the consequences?
The accountability?
The systems that respond
when someone crosses the line?
As I grew older, the questions changed.
I learned more about
silence, dismissal, normalization, excuses.
And then came a question
I wasn’t prepared for.
What if one of them is someone I know?
If someone told me
a person I knew had abused them,
would I believe them?
Or would I say,
“That doesn’t sound like him.”
Would I defend the person I know?
Question the person speaking?
Protect a relationship?
A reputation?
A family?
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I began discovering my own assumptions.
My own biases.
And I wondered:
If it happened to me, would I be believed?
If it happened to someone I loved, would they?
Fast-forward to today.
More than a decade
since that girl in Delhi.
And still,
Stay home.
Be careful.
Stay alert.
Watch what you wear.
Watch where you go.
Watch whom you trust.
The same instructions
I remember.
The same ones
my mother remembers.
The same ones
my grandmother could attest to.
And now,
the same ones
being handed to my sisters.
A girl grows up
with instructions for everything.
How to sit.
How to dress.
How to speak.
Where to go.
When to leave.
Whom to trust.
What to watch for.
A whole checklist.
And somewhere else,
“Oh, he’s just a boy.”
“Men will be men.”
Said with a laugh.
Brushed aside.
Until behavior that should have raised questions
became ordinary. Normal.
And I wondered: Where is the other checklist?
Respect boundaries.
Understand consent.
Accept rejection.
Take responsibility.
Know that another person’s body
is not an entitlement.
But then, I stop myself.
Is teaching enough?
Do people who commit these acts
really not know that what they’re doing is wrong?
Or do some know, and do it anyway?
What happens
when the person speaking up
knows they may not be believed?
When a family protects its own?
When shame falls on the person who speaks?
When justice means years of reliving what happened?
When consequences feel distant, uncertain, avoidable?
Maybe education is part of the answer.
But education without accountability can only go so far.
Because some people know better.
And choose wrong anyway.
So perhaps the question isn’t always:
“Were they ever taught?”Perhaps sometimes it is:
“What made them believe
they could get away with it?”
And that’s where “we” gets complicated.
Because “we” aren’t only
the people raising children
and teaching right from wrong.
We are also the people who respond afterward.
The families who believe, or don’t.
The friends who speak, or stay silent.
The institutions that act, or look away.
The systems that decide
whether accountability follows.
And, sadly, women aren’t outside that “we.”
The mother who cannot believe
her son could do such a thing.
The sister who instinctively
defends her brother.
The wife who looks away.
The woman who tells another girl
to stay quiet because speaking might bring shame
to the family.
Sometimes,
the same people
who inherited the checklist
help preserve the world
that made the checklist necessary.
And perhaps
that is one of the hardest things
to acknowledge.
Which brings me back
to the checklist.
After generations
of teaching girls
how to protect themselves,
did we even succeed in keeping them safe?
A girl with pepper spray, is she safe?
A girl carrying something sharp, could it protect her??
A girl walking outside in broad daylight, did she make it home safe?
A girl who follows every single rule, is she guaranteed anything?Did the checklist work?
Maybe the problem
was never something
a checklist could solve.
Because it isn’t only
what we teach.
It is what we tolerate.
What we excuse.
What we laugh off.
What we ignore.
Whom we believe.
Whom we protect.
What we normalize.
And what happens
when someone crosses the line anyway.
So,
is there a solution?
Something beyond
pepper spray, different routes,
shared locations, phone calls while travelling,
streets to avoid, curfews,
classes moved online, offices closed early,
and a lifetime of staying alert?
Perhaps the measure
of a society’s safety
shouldn’t be
how many precautions
we can put in place
to protect a girl.
Perhaps it should be
how little she needs them.
Sadly, I don’t have an answer.
After all these years,
I still have questions.
Will we ever reach a point
where girls no longer inherit
the same checklist,
and boys no longer inherit
the same excuses?
Even if we
teach better,
listen better,
intervene sooner,
hold people accountable,
will it be enough?
Or ten years from now,
will it be my niece? My daughter?
Or simply another girl,
half my age,
asking the same questions
generations before her asked?
I don’t know.
Maybe all I can do
is hope
that someday,
ten years
or a hundred years from now,
a girl can simply walk.
Go where she wants.
Stay out after dark.
Live without calculating
every step against her safety.
And maybe then,
she won’t have to ask
the same whys and whats
generations before her did.
