When “Indecency” Becomes a Matter of Interpretation

The recent conversation around dress and “indecency” in Rwanda raises a question that extends well beyond what people should or should not wear in public.

It raises a more fundamental question:

How do we define a problem before deciding how to solve it?

At first glance, regulating indecent behaviour may seem straightforward. Most societies have boundaries around what is considered appropriate in public spaces. The difficulty begins when a concept such as “indecent attire” is applied without a sufficiently objective understanding of what falls within that definition.

Because indecency is not experienced or defined in a vacuum.

What one person considers indecent may be perfectly ordinary to another. Perceptions are shaped by gender, age, religion, culture, class, upbringing, social environment and personal values. Even within the same community, there can be significant differences in what people consider appropriate.

That creates an important question:

When a subjective standard is enforced by someone with authority, whose interpretation becomes the standard?

And that is where the conversation becomes bigger than clothing.

What Does the Law Actually Say?

Rwanda does have a legal framework addressing public indecency.

Article 143 of Law No. 68/2018 determining offences and penalties in general provides that a person who performs an indecent act in public commits an offence. Upon conviction, the person may be sentenced to between six months and two years’ imprisonment.

The important distinction, however, is between public indecency as an offence and a particular item of clothing being defined as indecent.

Article 143 does not provide a specific list of clothing that constitutes an offence. It does not establish a particular length of skirt, type of top, amount of exposed skin or style of dress as automatically unlawful. Its wording refers broadly to an “indecent act” in public.

This question of definition is not new.

In June 2023, a Bill proposing amendments to the Penal Code sought to provide greater specificity around public indecency. The proposed provisions expressly identified nudity and sexual intercourse in public as acts of public indecency. Contemporary reporting noted that the existing Penal Code did not specify particular acts constituting the offence.

The proposal is significant because it demonstrated that greater clarity around what constitutes public indecency had already been considered at the legislative level.

The Bill subsequently became Law No. 059/2023 of 4 December 2023, which amended Law No. 68/2018. However, the enacted law did not incorporate that proposed clarification of Article 143; its listed amendments concern other provisions of the Penal Code.

The distinction therefore remains important.

There is a legal prohibition against public indecency. But a legal prohibition against an “indecent act” is not the same thing as a statutory list defining which particular items of clothing are unlawful.

That brings us back to a broader question: where does the boundary lie between an objectively identifiable offence and a subjective assessment of appropriateness?

There is a difference between people having different opinions about morality and the State having the authority to act on one particular interpretation of morality.

The moment an official can determine that someone's clothing crosses an undefined line, that discretion becomes consequential.

Two people could wear essentially the same thing and receive different responses depending on who is making the assessment.

That is not necessarily because the person enforcing the rule has bad intentions. It is because subjective standards are, by their nature, susceptible to subjective application.

There is also a gender dimension that deserves careful consideration, not necessarily as an accusation of patriarchy, but as something worth observing. When conversations about public morality become centred on clothing, it is often women's bodies that become the primary object of scrutiny.

That should prompt another question: are we addressing the behaviour we are actually concerned about, or are we inadvertently creating another layer of social policing?

The Cobra Effect

This is where the idea of the cobra effect becomes particularly interesting.

The term comes from a well-known story about an attempt to reduce the number of venomous cobras in colonial India. A reward was offered for dead cobras. People began breeding cobras to claim the reward. When the government cancelled the programme, the bred cobras were released, making the original problem worse.

Whether every detail of that historical story is accurate is less important than the principle it illustrates:

An intervention can create incentives or consequences that move us further away from the outcome we intended.

That is a useful principle far beyond economics or public administration.

If the concern is public safety, inappropriate sexual behaviour, exploitation, harassment or conduct that genuinely harms others, then the question should be:

What intervention most effectively addresses that behaviour?

If the concern is the wellbeing of young people, what evidence tells us what is driving the problem?

If the concern is inappropriate conduct at entertainment venues, can the conduct itself be addressed rather than creating a broad category that requires someone to determine whether an outfit is “decent” enough?

The distinction matters.

Because a solution that is easy to enforce is not necessarily a solution that solves the problem.

The Importance of Defining the Problem

A recurring challenge in development, governance and public policy is the temptation to design interventions before adequately defining the problem they are intended to address.

A good intervention should begin with a clear understanding of:

What exactly are we trying to change?

What is causing it?

Who is affected?

What evidence do we have?

What are the possible unintended consequences?

And perhaps most importantly:

How will we know that the intervention worked?

These questions do not diminish the importance of maintaining social norms or public order. They help ensure that the response is proportionate to the problem.

There is nothing wrong with society debating standards of public behaviour. There is nothing wrong with parents, communities, religious institutions or individuals having their own views about appropriate dress.

But when we move from social preference to state enforcement, the standard deserves a much higher level of clarity.

Because the more subjective the rule, the greater the discretion.

And the greater the discretion, the greater the possibility that two people will experience the same rule differently.

Perhaps the Better Question

Perhaps the conversation should move away from simply asking:

“Is this outfit decent?”

and towards asking:

“What problem are we trying to solve, and is this the most effective and proportionate way of solving it?”

That question leaves room for public order, cultural values and social norms while recognising something equally important:

Good intentions do not automatically produce good outcomes.

Sometimes the most responsible thing we can do is pause before intervening and ask whether the intervention might create a problem of its own.

This is not about being for or against a particular way of dressing.

It is about making sure that, in trying to solve one problem, we do not inadvertently create another.

Because ultimately, the quality of a solution should not be measured only by how firmly it is enforced.

It should also be measured by whether it actually solves the problem it was designed to address.