Supreme Court Wants Judges To Mind Their Language In The court
· Free Press Journal
Thirty long years after the trial court acquitted upper-caste men of raping activist Bhanwari Devi with such egregious reasoning as dominant-caste men would not rape an oppressed-caste woman, and after courts across India continued using morally loaded terms such as “fallen woman” in cases, the judicial language of courts and cases may become less judgmental and more gender-sensitive.
Judicial language shapes justice, gender rights activists have argued for decades. Accepting this as the basis and analysing 125 trial court judgments from across India, an expert committee headed by former Supreme Court judge Justice Aniruddha Bose submitted its report this week, calling for a new “language ecosystem” in the judiciary to replace patriarchal, moralistic and stigmatising expressions.
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Report Calls For Change
The report specified scores of words and phrases to be avoided, such as “prosecutrix”, “helpless woman”, “outraged her modesty”, “destroyed her life”, “poor helpless minor girl”, “lost her chastity”, “victim of another person’s lust”, “spoiled her childhood” and references to a woman’s “honour”, “shame”, “sanctity” or “bashfulness”.
Instead, it recommended non-moralistic, non-woman-blaming, neutral terms such as “victim”, “survivor”, “complainant”, “sexual assault”, “sexual violence”, “violation of bodily autonomy” and “bodily autonomy”.
A more nuanced recommendation would have retired “victim” too in favour of “survivor”. The report also advised judges to use “partner” or “sex worker” instead of “mistress”, “concubine”, “kept”, “call girl” or “prostitute”.
The report, Judgments and Gender: Sensitivity and Compassion in Writing Judgments, traces its origins to a suo motu case by a Bench headed by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant in February after controversial observations made by the Allahabad High Court in a case.
The ball is now clearly in the courts across India to recognise that such words and phrases tend to shame women who have already suffered physical, mental and emotional abuse but have gathered the courage to stand before judges.
Shaming them with language has no place in a courtroom. It did not, even in the 1990s, when the Bhanwari Devi case lit up courtrooms and, upon the acquittal of the men, the streets, where gender rights activists demanded better of the judiciary. That it took more than 30 years for even a report outlining gender-sensitive language tells its own tale.
Earlier Handbook Echoed Concerns
Interestingly, this report was preceded by a handbook released in August 2023 by the then Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud, with inputs from the Indian Feminist Judgements Project. The trigger was the Delhi High Court’s controversial judgment in the Mahmood Farooqui case, holding that a woman’s “feeble no” may mean “yes”.
The handbook for judges and the legal community also recommended doing away with the use of “harmful stereotypes on the basis of gender” and words such as “easy”, “fallen” and “slut”, which convey a misplaced sense of moral censure.
The recommendations are now in place; it is up to each judge across India to heed them. More sensitive language is the bare minimum women litigants expect.