As per the book Tipping Point , ( and since I have not read any other book on criminal psychology, I will take it as my holy grail ), if you want to curb a serious and major crime, you need to stop the petty crimes.
So I feel the provision to make Voyeurism , stalking and eve-teasing as punishable crime as per the new Crime Against Women bill can be quite instrumental to bring down the cases of rape in general.
In that book, when murders and thefts were quite rampant in subways and metros of New York city in 90's, the police decided to tackle the problem at petty level. Most of the people , seeing the law and order situation at such places , used to dodge taking tickets and used to jump over those turnstile. So the first thing police did was increase the vigilance at the turnstile ensuring that people do punch tickets and whosoever tries to avoid that was caught at that very moment , handcuffed and taken to police station. This not only made people follow the basic rules of subway travel but also reinstalled the respect and faith in the law and order system.
Soon people found that the murders and thefts that were becoming so common in New York subways, became extinct overnight, whereas nothing as such was drastically done for that specific problem.
So the point is that if we prevent people from even doing small basic crimes, which at times we tend to overlook, then it very much discourages them from doing even heftier crimes.
The problem with India is that no body (read public) does anything when you encounter someone teasing or passing lewd comments at public places. And if somehow somebody takes the courage to protest then the teasers don't even blink before harming them gravely.
And because of this, they slowly slowly gather enough courage to commit even more heinous crimes.
I think most of the rapists don't straight a way jump into raping someone, they have a prolonged history of eve-teasing and stalking, so if they are stopped at those points itself then it may prevent them from becoming sex-offenders.
