The Confessions on Lock Upp Are Not Entertainment. They Are Evidence of a Society That Still Protects the Wrong People.

Lock Upp on Netflix is not a classic prison show with orange jumpsuits and clanging cell doors. It is a sleek, high-stakes reality format where celebrities are confined in a modern “jail,” forced to compete, form alliances, and—most crucially—surrender their deepest secrets as currency for survival. What has emerged from those forced revelations is not mere drama. It is a damning portrait of how routinely sexual exploitation and molestation occur, how thoroughly they are buried under guilt and shame, and how little society still does to make perpetrators carry the true cost.

Look at the specific stories that have surfaced. Harshad Chopda, a well-known television actor, spoke of being molested as a child of nine or ten by someone his family and the wider community trusted. He was a quiet, submissive boy who did not fully understand what was happening. He pretended to sleep. He never told anyone for years because fear and confusion locked the words inside him. The people who did this, he noted, are still living freely while he carries the residual fear. Shreya Kalra broke down describing how a cousin molested her at thirteen during stays at her grandmother’s house. Only her partner knew. She stayed silent to protect her mother, who had cared for that same cousin after his own mother’s death, and out of worry that the truth would disrupt her brother’s upcoming wedding and further complicate family dynamics already strained by her public life. Shivangi Joshi recounted being targeted by a man the family called “Mama Ji”—a trusted figure her mother regarded like a brother. He used the pretext of helping her prepare for an acting career in Mumbai, including “teaching” her to drive by having her sit on his lap, and later escalated when she was alone at home. Her parents eventually intervened, but the fear kept her indoors and out of school for days afterward. Sufi Motiwala described a roommate who stared at him while he slept and then tried to force himself on him, followed by the PG owner responding not with protection but with his own proposition. Sufi locked himself in a bathroom for hours, processing the violation in isolation.

Then there is Akanksha Choudhary’s account. While preparing for a beauty pageant and short of funds for the necessary expenses, she approached an influential older man in that industry for temporary financial help, offering to work and repay him. What she received instead was a blunt proposition: money in exchange for sex, complete with a schedule of how many times a month it would be expected. She refused. The casualness of the demand is what sticks. An older man in a position of relative power felt entirely entitled to treat a young woman’s need for opportunity as an opening for sexual leverage. No hesitation, no apparent sense that this was grotesque. Just the quiet assumption that this is how the world works for some people especially for women trying to climb in fields where access is controlled by older gatekeepers.

These are not obscure or marginalized voices. These are public figures with careers, platforms, and relative advantages. Yet even they carried these experiences in silence for years—sometimes more than a decade—out of the same toxic mix of guilt, shame, fear of family rupture, career damage, and the belief that speaking would somehow make them the problem. When this many people in one confined group, drawn from the relatively privileged world of television and social media, share versions of the same wound, it stops being coincidence. It becomes a pattern.

That pattern reveals something deeply broken about the society we inhabit. We have normalized a culture in which the victim absorbs the shame while the perpetrator often retains social standing, family protection, and the benefit of doubt. Children and young people are taught—explicitly or through silence—that loyalty to family reputation, community harmony, or an adult’s “respectability” outweighs their own safety and right to be believed. Parents leave children with “trusted” people because trust is extended too readily and accountability is demanded too rarely. Cousins, “uncles,” roommates, industry figures, and community elders exploit proximity, authority, or financial power knowing the odds of public exposure are low. Victims stay quiet because they correctly assess the social cost: broken relationships, accusations of exaggeration or motive, damage to other family members’ lives, professional blacklisting, and the exhausting labor of having to prove what should never have needed proof.

The beauty-pageant proposition is especially telling. It is not an isolated “bad apple.” It is the logical extension of a system in which older men in positions of influence routinely treat young women’s ambitions as transactional. The fact that such a demand can be made so directly, with a schedule attached, shows how thoroughly the entitlement has been internalized. The man did not appear to fear consequences. Why would he? Society has long taught him that his desires matter more than her dignity, that her need creates an opening, and that silence will protect him far more effectively than it protects her.

The result is a quiet epidemic. When celebrities who have cameras, producers, and eventual public sympathy still waited years to speak—and only did so under the artificial pressure of a reality-show task—what is the story for the ordinary person? The common man or woman has fewer resources, less social capital, greater economic dependence on family or employers, and often stronger community scrutiny. There is no carefully edited episode waiting to validate their pain. There is only the risk of being disbelieved, isolated, labeled difficult, or told to “move on” for the sake of everyone else’s comfort. Many never tell a single person. The silence is not personal failure. It is a rational response to a system that has repeatedly shown it prioritizes the reputation of the powerful or the familiar over the safety of the vulnerable.

We have not shamed the perpetrators enough. Too often the social response focuses on the victim’s timing, their decision to speak (or not speak), the potential damage to family gatherings, weddings, careers, or industry relationships, rather than on the person who chose to exploit a child, a young adult, or a woman seeking a legitimate opportunity. The people who harmed Harshad, Shreya, Shivangi, Sufi, Akanksha and countless others are frequently still “hale and hearty,” still moving through the same social and professional circles, still protected by the same instincts of denial and deflection. Until that changes—until the default cultural reaction is to protect the survivor and isolate the abuser—we will continue producing the same outcomes: adults who carry lifelong fear, distorted trust, and the residual belief that what happened was somehow their burden to manage alone.

Lock Upp did not create this reality. It simply made it harder to look away by placing it inside a popular entertainment format. The confessions of Harshad, Shreya, Shivangi, Sufi, Akanksha and others should not be consumed as just another week of secrets and strategy. They are data points in a larger failure. A society that forces its victims to perform courage on camera while allowing perpetrators—whether trusted relatives or entitled older men in industry—to remain comfortable in the shadows is not a healthy one. Ordinary people deserve better than the silent endurance that even the famous have had to practice for so long. The shame belongs elsewhere. It is long past time we placed it where it actually belongs.