Human rights policy should focus not just on advocating policy remedies to stigma, discrimination and violence, but also on promoting measures that will contribute to changing attitudes and beliefs about the value of women, girls and trans people and their rights to physical and bodily autonomy, to economic agency, to having a voice in the full range of family and social decisions which affect them and shape their lives. Changing laws to respect women’s, girls’ and trans people’s rights is important, but laws (and law enforcement) are only an instrument of social justice – they do not guarantee justice. For instance, in the recent debate in reaction to the December 2013 rape and subsequent death of a young woman in India, we heard calls for stricter law enforcement and harsher criminal penalties. These proposed remedies tended to overshadow attention to the underlying patriarchal, class and caste norms that persist in Indian society, and which must be addressed and changed if women and girls are going to live lives free from (sexual) violence.