NO woman would be molested on a dark road. No girl would be followed home. No woman would be assaulted outside a railway station. No teenager would have to clutch her phone, pretend to call her father and speed-walk home because there are men hanging around the corner.And best of all, we could finally stop giving women safety instructions. Don’t go out late. Don’t walk alone. Don’t take that road. Don’t wear that dress. Don’t get into that cab. Don’t drink. Don’t trust strangers. Carry pepper spray. Share your location. Call me when you reach. Basically, don’t live.Because apparently the easiest way to deal with male violence is to make women’s lives smaller. And the latest horror from Jamui, Bihar, tells us exactly how grotesque this logic has become. Two Class 10 students were returning after coaching when they were surrounded and assaulted by a group of boys. Videos show the girl being manhandled and sexually harassed while the boy accompanying her is attacked, as he tries to intervene. Police have registered a POCSO case, identified the perpetrators and arrested some, with an SIT investigating the matter.Read that again. Class 10. Returning from coaching. Children. Not women sneaking out of a nightclub at midnight. Not some imaginary “modern girl” invented by moral policemen to explain away sexual violence.And yet, when something like this happens, our national reflex is to ask: Why were they there? What were they doing alone? Why didn’t they take another route?But nobody is asking the more important question. Why did these boys think they could do this? Why did they think there would be no consequences?That is the question India needs to sit with. Because sexual violence isn’t an act of nature. It isn’t a storm that suddenly arrives. It is a human being making a decision to violate another human being.And every time we respond by restricting the victim instead of confronting the perpetrator, we teach the next predator exactly what he needs to know: that the woman will carry the burden of his crime.She will change her clothes, her route, her timings. She will carry pepper spray, learn self-defence. She will stop travelling alone, stop going to parties. She will stop trusting men. She will stop living.And he? He will continue walking around thinking women’s bodies are his to molest, tease, hit, rape and murder.  There is something deeply corrosive about the almost coronation of men accused or convicted of serious crimes, while survivors are expected to disappear quietly into their homes.The Jamui video is shocking because we can see the violence. But what about the girl who has no video? What about the child whose attacker threatens her into silence? What about the woman whose family tells her not to complain because “log kya kahenge”? What about the survivor whose case gets buried under adjournments, intimidation and social shame?A viral video should not be the admission ticket to justice. And this is why POCSO has to mean something beyond an acronym we remember whenever a particularly horrific video goes viral. When the victim is a child, the state has an especially serious obligation to investigate swiftly, protect the survivor and prosecute the accused.Because an arrest is not justice. An FIR is not justice. A press conference is not justice. Justice is when the system makes it clear that a child cannot be sexually assaulted without consequences. For law doesn’t only punish, it sends messages. And the message cannot be that some people are so powerful, popular or politically significant that consequences become strangely elastic.We keep telling women to be afraid. Maybe we should start teaching predators to be afraid. And yes, I know: “Ban men after 7 pm” is absurd. Exactly. That is the point.Imagine telling every man in India: Sorry, you can’t go outside after 7 pm. It’s for your own safety. Too many men commit crimes at night. Imagine the outrage, the constitutional arguments. And yet women have been living versions of this restriction forever.We have normalised the idea that freedom is something women can have only after calculating the risk. So, no, I don’t want a safer India in which girls are safely locked inside their homes. I want an India in which girls can walk home without having to calculate whether the men on the road are safe. I want an India in which boys grow up knowing that a girl’s body is not public property. I want an India in which bystanders intervene instead of filming, in which police action doesn’t begin only after a video goes viral.I want an India in which the question after a sexual assault is not, “Why was she there?” It is, “Why did he think he could do this?” So perhaps we should keep the 7 pm rule. Except, let’s flip it.Let the women stay out. The women walk home. The women travel, laugh loudly, wear what they want, study late, work late, party late, live late. And the predators? They stay home. Because maybe it is finally time that women stopped living under curfew for the crimes committed by men.— The writer is an acclaimed author