In response, the custodians of men’s rights came to the fore, abdicating responsibility for the incident with the hashtag #notallmen.

But this isn’t about “the good, decent men. Because enough men out there are bad,” one Twitter user explains. And it avoids acknowledging there are real social issues plaguing India’s daughters.

India’s patriarchal culture has treated women as second-class citizens for centuries. Female babies are often killed—in the womb or after birth–or abandoned in India, leading to one of the world’s most skewed sex ratios: boys outnumber girls in many of the country’s 29 states. For women who escape violence in childhood, early adulthood can be dangerous and even deadly: jilted men sometimes attack women who refuse marriage proposals with acid. Although dowry has been banned in India for more than five decades, the practice is still rampant. Over 7,600 dowry deaths—where women are murdered or driven to suicide by harassment and torture by husbands and in-laws trying to extort further dowry—were reported in the country in 2015, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. And the country still doesn’t have a law against marital rape.

Many Twitter users are arguing that the discourse around the New Year’s tragedy needs to be centered around Indian women, almost all of whom have been at the receiving end of an unwanted brush on the bus, a deliberate shove on the train, or far more severe incidents of sexual assault at some point in their lives.

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