How safe are we in Goa?

Last week, a court in Jammu and Kashmir's Anantnag district rejected the bail plea of a man who has been accused of raping a 70-year-old woman, in a hotel room in Pahalgam.

The court, rejecting the bail plea said the alleged crime was ‘a reflection of the highest degree of depravity and sick mentality in society’ and demanded ‘a serious introspection’ of societal values and mores.

Sexual assault is not restricted to Jammu and Kashmir. There are media reports of these happening across the country, and one reads about them almost daily. Some are discussed more, others less, but the crime is no less and it keeps happening.

News coming in while writing this was that bike-borne men raped a teenaged girl in Pune, and robbed three women at knifepoint. Simultaneously, the television channels were breaking the news of victim-shaming of the Kolkata rape.

Back in Goa, there is every reason to be despondent. News reports have indicated a ‘disturbing rise’ of nearly 19 percent from January to June 2025 of sexual assault cases in the State.

As per the data that the media provided, there were 54 cases registered between January 1 and June 15 this year, up from 44 during the same period in 2024.

What is even more serious, than just the number of crimes registered in Goa, is that the cases range from sexual assaults on minors to senior citizens, including one on a bedridden woman of 90 years.

Something like that certainly qualifies to be described as ‘depravity and sick mentality’, and yes, Goa needs to ‘introspect’ on this immediately. But it can’t just introspect; it has to go beyond to determine what makes society behave in such a manner and how it can be stopped.

This is not merely a law and order situation, this requires to be looked through a psychological prism to understand what is leading to such crimes.

While it may look at the mental processes, the motivations and the personality traits of the accused, it would also do well to explore this on a wider scale of society as a whole.

The latter is important, as the reaction to such crimes from society as not as strong as could be expected. Just imagine how Goa, a couple of decades ago, would react to a rape on a bedridden woman of 90, and how it has done so now.

Is this reaction telling us something of how, as a society, we have turned immune to such heinous crimes?

Just days after these statistics were published, there came news of an acid attack on a teenager by a man, who subsequently claimed that he did it as the boy had had an affair with his daughter, who had died under unnatural circumstances.

Investigations are still on, but is a crime to avenge a previous alleged crime how civil society should react?

What about the law and the enforcement agencies? Aren’t they here to protect the citizens from people taking the law into their own hands? Or, is it that the people have lost confidence in the authorities delivering justice? In the case of the acid attack, it leans towards being the latter.

It appears that in Goa, nobody is safe any longer — whether boy or man, girl or woman — anybody can be attacked at any time. The 90-year-old woman was in bed in her house when she was raped. The teenaged boy was waiting for the bus to take him to college when he had acid thrown at him.

There are various dimensions to what is occurring in Goa, but we need to look at it as a law and order issue, and also as a psychological problem that needs to be diagnosed and treated.

It may be easy to point fingers and say that law and order has collapsed, and perhaps it has, and there is no attempt to argue on that point, but mental health assessment will also aid in tackling the issue of sexual attacks.

Dealing with crime, sexual attack cases in particular, requires a multi-pronged approach which addresses the root cause, and its prevention will not be achieved with the presence of police officers everywhere, which is not possible, but through education and respect for each other.