Column | Yogita Bhayana: fighting the epidemic of sexual violence in India

Yogita Bhayana, 45, is the sutradhaar (narrator) of the endless horror that Indian girls and women relive every day. Her X timeline jumps from one rape to the next, each more brutal, each victim younger, telling a story about this country that most prefer to ignore.

As a social activist and founder of People Against Rape in India (PARI), Bhayana urges women to rise against intimate partner violence and street assaults. In a country where 81 women report rapes daily (National Crime Records Bureau, 2023), most by known men, Bhayana dreams the impossible dream of a rape-free India.

You’ve likely seen videos of police dragging her during a protest at India Gate with the 2017 Unnao gang-rape survivor and her mother. This came after the Delhi High Court suspended former Bharatiya Janata Party MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar’s sentence for raping the then teenager; the Supreme Court soon stayed the order.

Nine years on, the survivor battles fresh trauma, fending off online attacks by Sengar’s daughters and their supporters, who she says exposed her identity. Bhayana’s hands are full shielding and counselling her. “The courts are on our side,” she reassures.

She’s torn about where she should go next. Patna, where a teenage medical aspirant was assaulted and found dead in her hostel? Or Manipur, site of a 2023 ATM abduction, gang rape and torture that resulted in the death of the teenage survivor this month from complications? “I want to go to both places, but if I look in Delhi too, I will find many such cases,” says Bhayana. She says she chases the cases everyone ignores.

I wonder aloud if she ever tires of the relentless advocacy. Of course, she says. “I feel frustrated, exhausted, I don’t feel in the game. I feel like giving up multiple times,” says Bhayana. “I don’t know in which direction to run.”

Assisting the family

Most of us look away from the lives of the marginalised but Bhayana is what she is today because she stopped when she saw an accident victim bleed out on the road in 2002. “The government hospital was an eye-opener, I saw the aloofness and attitude there. He died as I was begging them to attend to him,” she recalls.

Bhayana helped the family fight for compensation and witnessed how society preys on the widow. “I was naive, I could not guide her,” she adds.

Hospitals still make her angry and every time she visits one, she makes it a point to look around and see what people are going through, and if she can, help make their experience even a little better. “I go to the medical superintendent, I raise my voice, I can at least get a few people some help,” she says.

After stints at Sahara and Kingfisher Airlines, Bhayana did a Masters in disaster management and volunteered for accident victims and hospital reforms, learning to speak up on the job. She’s currently a third-year law student because the pro bono lawyers she uses sometimes let her down.

Yogita Bhayana (far right) and others at a protest in Delhi in solidarity with the Unnao gangrape survivor.
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

Helping children in need

When she volunteered with the National Commission for Women (NCW), travelling to the Hindi heartland in the run-up to the gang rape of 23-year-old physiotherapy intern Jyoti Singh in Delhi in 2012, she didn’t fully comprehend the extent of violence that women faced. “It’s only when I protested after the Nirbhaya rape, sitting constantly at Jantar Mantar, that I started getting calls non-stop from women,” she says. After the incident, she quit the NCW to protest against the government, morphing into an activist who spoke against the establishment. That’s also when she founded PARI.

Back then, she protested outside the juvenile jail with Singh’s mother as one of her daughter’s rapists, a minor, was due to be released. The women demanded the Rajya Sabha pass a pending Bill that would lower the juvenile age threshold from 18 to 16 years for children accused of ‘heinous’ offences. Critics said it was passed to appease a society that couldn’t take responsibility for its children who commit crimes.

Since then, Bhayana has helped many, prioritising POCSO cases of children, the toughest fights. She’s a repository for the lost dreams of girls. “Someone wanted to be a doctor, someone was just happy being a girl,” she says. “When I hear these stories from the families of those who are no more, I come home blank, I don’t talk to anyone for days.”

One 2007 government survey across 13 States estimated that 53.22% of children faced sexual abuse. Bhayana says the reality is worse. “Nine out of 10 girls are abused, five out of 10 boys,” she says. “Most are not reported, nobody talks about them. It’s only when there is an injury or a medical emergency that they come to light.”

Bhayana takes frequent breaks to stay sane, leaning on food, friends and travel for comfort. She’s just started a hashtag tracking politicians who don’t take sexual violence seriously, like the Karnataka Congress leader who dismissed rape as a ‘small incident’. She asks her followers to pledge that they will not vote for such politicians.

And as she waits for more Indian women to speak up and for the state and societal infrastructure around them to improve so they can exit abusive relationships, she directs her energy to advocacy and prevention — relentlessly.

The writer is a Bengaluru-based journalist and the co-founder of India Love Project on Instagram.

Published – January 30, 2026 08:23 am IST