Safety in public spaces shouldn’t feel like a gamble — yet for many women in Indian cities, it still does.
actor recently shared a personal account that speaks to this persistent, everyday anxiety, challenging the widely held belief that is a safe city for women. “People often say Mumbai is safe for women, but I’d like to correct that perception,” she said in an interview with . “Today, I have my own car and driver, so if someone asks me whether Mumbai is safe, I might be inclined to say yes. But my perspective was very different when I was in college. I used to travel by local trains and public buses, and back then, it never felt entirely safe. It always felt like a matter of luck. You had to hope your commute would be uneventful.”
Recounting a chilling incident from her college days, Malavika said, “I was on a local train with two of my closest friends… around 9.30 pm… in the first-class women’s compartment… The train was quite empty. We were sitting near one of the window grills, chatting, when a man walked up to the window, stuck his face right up against the bars and said, ‘ (Will you give me a kiss?)’” She continued, “We froze… We were just three young girls, completely vulnerable.”
Gurleen Baruah, existential psychotherapist at That Culture Thing, says, “Having a car and driver gives a woman something most people take for granted — choice. It’s not just about transport; it’s about control. It lets her move through the city with more confidence, without constantly negotiating her presence, her clothing, her body language. That quiet ease of mind — of not having to stay alert every single second — is powerful.”
However, the fact that safety comes with access to private transportation raises an unsettling question about how our cities are designed. Public spaces, in theory, belong to everyone. But in reality, they often feel like . When basic safety is tied to what you can afford, it exposes a deeper failure: that urban planning, public transport, and social norms still don’t centre the lived experiences of women.
When young women freeze during harassment, it’s a nervous system response — one that often gets misunderstood. Baruah mentions, “Psychologically, the freeze reaction is part of our survival wiring. It happens when neither fight nor flight feels possible — when the threat feels too sudden or the power imbalance too stark. And this freeze response isn’t rare — it’s the tip of an iceberg of chronic hypervigilance that women carry every day.”
From a systems lens, she states that the real failure is not that women freeze — but that the systems around them make them feel alone when they do. So the interventions we need must be both psychological and systemic, highlights Baruah. “ in schools can help normalise these responses and offer safe ways to process them. Bystander training in communities can help others step in. Public institutions must not only respond after the fact, but also actively create safer environments — such as better lighting, quicker complaint mechanisms, and the presence of female security staff. When women know their freeze response will be understood, and that support will follow, they stop blaming themselves. And that’s the first step in helping them reclaim agency.”
