New Delhi, Sep 24 (PTI) The Supreme Court on Thursday said a woman can’t be suspected for her inability to report instances of sexual or physical violence at the hands of her spouse, as such silence is not an exception but rather a norm in the Indian context.
The observations were made by the top court while trashing the defence of a man, who was convicted for repeatedly sexually assaulting and murdering his six-year-old step-daughter, that he can’t be punished on the basis of the testimony of his wife who kept silent about the offence for long.
“A court alive to the realities of abuse within the home must be vigilant not to lend itself to this stratagem, and must ensure that the disabilities which the abuser imposed upon his victim are not permitted to enure to his benefit,” a bench of Justices Vikram Nath, Sandeep Mehta and Vijay Bishnoi said.
The bench noted that according to the fifth National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), conducted in the years 2019 to 2021, approximately 29.3 per cent of ever-married women in India in the age group of 18 to 49 years reported having experienced physical or sexual violence at the hands of their spouse.
It said as per the survey, “of the women who had experienced such violence, on the order of three-fourths never sought help from any quarter and never so much as disclosed the violence to any person”.
“These figures, drawn from the largest such survey in the country, establish that the silence of abused woman is not the exception but the norm, and that the failure to report is the overwhelmingly common response and not an aberration calling for suspicion,” the apex court said.
The bench commuted the death sentence handed down to the man to a jail term for the remainder of his natural life.
The apex court delivered its verdict on an appeal filed by the convict challenging a November 2019 judgment of the Madhya Pradesh High Court’s Indore bench, which affirmed his conviction and death sentence in the case.
In its 157-page judgment, the top court noted that the solitary eyewitness to the events was the mother of the victim.
It also noted that the victim’s mother was earlier married to another person, from whom she had four children, and after his death, she had married the appellant.
The appellant had argued that the conduct of the victim’s mother was “irreconcilable” with that of a truthful witness, or that of a mother, as she made no complaint to police or to her own family though the abuse continued over months.
“It must be emphasised that human beings do not react to trauma, to terror and to abuse in a uniform or a predictable manner, and that there is no standard or model response against which the conduct of a victim or a witness may be measured and, if found wanting, condemned as false,” the bench said.
It said recently, the top court had deprecated in strongest terms the tendency to judge the conduct of women who are victims of, or witnesses to, sexual crime against stereotyped assumptions of how such women ought to comport themselves.
It said the reticence of a victim of a sexual offence, or of a person compelled to witness one, may spring from fear, from shame, from social constraint or from a well-founded apprehension of the consequences of speaking, and delay or silence attributable to such causes is not a badge of falsehood.
Referring to the victim’s mother, the bench said she was a widow of the first marriage, without means of her own and had entered upon a second marriage with the appellant and brought her child into his house.
It said her movements were controlled, contacts were regulated and her access to telephone was confined to numbers her husband permitted.
“A woman so placed is not a free agent who may be expected to walk into a police station at the first opportunity. She is, in a real and not a merely rhetorical sense, a captive,” the bench said.
It said to read her enforced silence in the home as complicity, while ignoring her resistance at every point where resistance was possible, would be to misread the record.
The bench said an unlocked door is not an open road to freedom for a woman without means, without money for the journey, without a place of refuge secure from a husband who had threatened to bury her, and burdened with a gravely injured child whom she could not carry to safety.
“It is a recurring feature of cases of this nature that the very conditions of secrecy, isolation and terror by which the abuser secures his dominance and the silence of his victim are afterwards pressed into service, in the courtroom, as arguments to discredit that victim when at last she speaks, so that, as the scholarship we have referred to observes, the perpetrator who cannot maintain secrecy turns instead to attacking the credibility of his victim,” it said.
The bench said the perpetrator, who has procured silence through fear, then seeks to convert that silence, and the imperfections of a disclosure made late and under duress, into proof that the abuse never occurred.
“For the reasons we have given, we hold that the conduct of the mother of the victim, far from impairing her credibility, is consistent with the truth of her account, and that the submission founded upon it must be rejected,” it said. PTI
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