Sexual consent in India: we’ve learned the vocabulary, but what about the behaviour?

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We have become rather good at talking about consent. There are campaigns about it, dating-app prompts about it, and enough Instagram explainers to suggest that the vocabulary is no longer the problem. The more interesting question in India in 2026 is whether the behaviour has caught up.

A study published in PLOS ONE, a peer-reviewed, open-access, multi-disciplinary scientific journal published by the nonprofit Public Library of Science, on January 8, 2025, offers a useful starting point. In it, researchers from the International Institute for Population Sciences in Mumbai analysed data from 101,839 Indian men aged 15 to 54, collected through the National Family Health Survey-5 between 2019 and 2021. It found that 63% of men had favourable attitudes towards women’s sexual autonomy. Seventy-five per cent agreed that a wife was justified in refusing sex if she was tired or simply not in the mood; 77% said she could refuse if her husband were having sex with other women, and 83% if he had a sexually transmitted infection. Men with more egalitarian attitudes towards decision-making at home were also more likely to support women’s sexual autonomy.

So far, so encouraging. But statistics have a way of looking tidier than real life.

A woman I spoke to, who grew up in Mumbai and moved to Delhi about three years ago for work, says her dating life slowed considerably after the move. She is sex-positive and has had an active dating life, but has become more hesitant about meeting men. What she finds interesting is the gap between what some men say and what they actually do. “They know the vocabulary — boundaries, comfort, communication, consent — but it sometimes feels like it is Internet speak: the language has been learnt without necessarily absorbing the meaning,” she says.

She notices it particularly around intimacy . If she says she does not want to try something, or that her body is not ready for it, the response may initially be understanding. But then, she says, she can see the disappointment arrive. She has noticed versions of this in Mumbai too, which makes the point less about one city being enlightened and another being hopeless, and more about how easily consent can become conditional: Of course I respect your no, but I am now slightly less interested in you because you said it.

A young man from Goa describes the opposite problem. Dating, he says, can sometimes feel like going through a series of checks: Is she comfortable? Is this okay? Should I stop? There are moments when he feels permanently on tenterhooks, particularly when he is trying not to get something wrong. One woman even told him, “You don’t need my consent for everything,” before adding that she was glad he did because most men don’t.

He has come to think that the awkwardness is useful. Men have not always been required to think very hard about where their responsibility begins and ends.