As World Celebrates Valentine, Women Face Harassment Over Rejection of Love

Hyderabad: A young man shot his classmate in a college classroom in Punjab this week, after she rejected his proposal, and then turned the gun on himself. The incident landed in headlines just as Valentine’s Week began. While it is a season that markets romance in red and pink, what happens when a girl says no? While this incident was in Punjab, Telangana is no stranger to rejections turning into retaliation.

“We receive complaints after breakups, where the other person continues to pressure the girl to stay in the relationship. These kinds of harassment are quite common,” said T. Usha Rani, DCP (Women Safety), Malkajgiri commissionerate.

Such crimes against women are reported throughout the year. Malkajgiri SHE Teams received 99 complaints of harassment from women in a month this year. Eighty-one offenders were apprehended, including 56 adults and 25 minors. Phone harassment accounted for 28 cases, social media harassment 26, and direct physical harassment 45. Eight criminal cases were registered. Twenty-five were booked as petty cases. Fifty-five were counselled. Decoy operations in the Metro caught men entering women-only compartments; fines followed.

These numbers sit beside lived memory. A 23-year-old postgraduate student in Hyderabad recalls changing her bus stop after refusing a classmate’s proposal. He began with calls, then texts, then messages on Instagram. “He said if I won’t talk to him, he will not let me live peacefully,” she said. She did not file a complaint. “I am scared, things might escalate if I do.”

SHE Team themselves shared a recent case, where a young woman was blackmailed by a man after rejecting his proposal. He started harassing her through calls and messages and began blackmailing her by threatening to send her personal photographs to her family members and friends. While this accused was arrested, most cases don’t even get reported.

National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data shows stalking cases rising from 8,810 in 2019 to 10,495 in 2023. Telangana recorded 1,884 stalking cases in 2023 the highest rate in the country at 9.9 per lakh population. While this might be because of better reporting, Hyderabad alone reported 416 stalking cases that year and convictions remain low.

Patruni Chidananda Sastry, an artist and an expert in gender issues, traces this arc to early conditioning. “Somewhere we instill the thought that men are superior,” he said, recalling how even childhood rituals treated boys and girls differently.

He said segregated classrooms, romanticising simple interactions, and rigid ideas about masculinity leave boys growing up “in silos”. In this scenario, rejection feels less like disappointment and more like an attack on authority. He pointed to online spaces that frame feminism as a threat to manhood and films that turn obsessive pursuit and toxic masculinity into heroism. “They have an instant thought that they have authority over that particular woman. It is this entitlement that is the problem.”

This echoes Simone de Beauvoir, French philosopher and feminist thinker, who once wrote that one is not born, but becomes, a woman. Masculinity, too, is constructed and often around entitlement and possession.

“If it’s consensual for both parties, it’s not an issue. When there’s no consent and the girl or woman is being pursued or pressured, it becomes harassment,” said DCP Usha Rani.

Professor Hameeda Bee of Osmania University argues that correction must begin long before college. Patriarchal conditioning, she said, remains present in families that excuse aggression as normal male behaviour. Boys are rarely taught how to accept refusal.

“Very early, parents and teachers have to train them to be gentle towards the opposite gender,” she said, adding that sensitisation programs must include men, not speak only to women.

Netflix’s Adolescence recently explored how boys absorb ideas about dominance online. Hyderabad’s complaint registers show a similar thread. Romance, when filtered through entitlement, can turn volatile. While Valentine’s Week may offer a script for love, crime records show what happens when someone refuses to exit that script.