India’s supreme court has issued a handbook for judges urging them to shun words like seductress, vamp, spinster and harlot when talking about women.
Archaic terms that disparage women and perpetuate gender stereotypes can still be routinely heard in Indian courts long after falling into disuse in other countries. It is not unusual for a wife to be described as chaste or ladylike, and sexual harassment is routinely trivialised as “Eve-teasing”.
The supreme court said its Handbook on Combating Gender Stereotypes was aimed at ensuring that “legal reasoning and writing is free of harmful notions about women”.
“If harmful stereotypes are relied on by judges, it can lead to a distortion of the objective and impartial application of the law. This will perpetuate discrimination and exclusion,” the chief justice of India, Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud, wrote in the handbook.
Chandrachud alluded to one of the most sexist scenarios that can play out in courtrooms: when judges ask an alleged rapist if he is prepared to marry the victim on the basis that being a married woman will lessen her dishonour and bestow respectability on her.
“Marriage is not a remedy to the violence of rape,” he wrote in the handbook.
He also criticised cultural assumptions that lay behind rulings that imply women have inherent characteristics, for example that all women want children or are more emotional than men.
Given that these assumptions still prevail in Indian society, it remains to be seen how successful the language drive will be in changing things.
As recently as 2020, a Karnataka high court judge ruled that it was “unbecoming of a woman to fall asleep after being raped”.
In 2018, a Kerala high court judge called a 24-year-old woman who had defied her parents to marry a Muslim, “weak and vulnerable, capable of being exploited in many ways”. The judge ruled in favour of her parents who wanted their daughter returned to their care and control.
Vrinda Bhandari, senior advocate in the supreme court, said she hoped the handbook’s advice would have a downstream effect on wider Indian society.
Ranjana Kumari, head of the Centre for Social Research in Delhi, called the handbook “long overdue”, but welcomed it. Kumari said she was glad that Chandrachud had underlined the fact that words were not just words but that they influenced judgments.
“Language is a tool through which we shape perceptions and behaviour. When lawyers use words like slut or whore, it is part of victim-shaming and will affect a woman’s legal fate,” she said.
