Within dominant global discourses on sexual violence, non-penetrative sexual assault remains marginal, under-theorized, and frequently rendered invisible. In many South Asian social contexts, such violations are further normalized as part of women's everyday existence. Yet for the women who live through them, these experiences constitute sites of ongoing, low-visibility crises that fundamentally disrupt safety, trust, and self-understanding. This paper examines how women make sense of non-penetrative sexual assault occurring within ordinary spaces and how such experiences reshape their understandings of safety, identity, and daily life.
Drawing on narrative interviews with ten Indian cisgender women aged 20-35, the study employs narrative analysis to trace meaning-making both in the immediate aftermath of violation and across time. The narratives illuminate how women structure, interpret, and rework what happened to them, foregrounding the cultural narratives and counter-narratives they draw upon, as well as the identity reconstruction through which they locate themselves within social worlds where such harms are normalized.
Across accounts, women describe the development of negotiated safety, conceptualized as an adaptive orientation to living that emerges in contexts marked by persistent gendered threat and systematic neglect. Rather than safety being experienced as a stable internal state, it is maintained through continuous behavioural, cognitive, and relational labour. This orientation reorganizes everyday practices, transforming commuting, working, socializing, and relational intimacy into sites of ongoing risk management. By centering women's narratives of sexual violation, this paper highlights how daily life coexists with enduring ruptures of trust that are lived, negotiated, and endured through the rhythms of everyday experience.