- Thursday, February 27, 2025
The apex court said its handbook looked at ensuring that “legal reasoning and writing is free of harmful notions about women”, The Guardian reported.
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE Supreme Court of India has come up with a handbook for judges asking them to avoid terms such as seductress, spinster, vamp and harlot when speaking about women.
The lawyers have also been advised to shun them while filing cases.
According to the top court, usage of such terms does not only demean women but could also adversely affect rulings.
Outdated words that denigrate women and sustain gender stereotypes can still be heard frequently in courts across India even if they are not in use in other countries. Sexual harassment is also often made trivial as “eve teasing”.
The initiative, which is a brainchild of D Y Chandrachud, the chief justice of India, lists in a book called ‘Combating Gender Stereotypes’ some common phrases used to describe women, children and sexual crimes, besides some common notions about gender, the Hindustan Times reported.
The book, which was released by the chief justice on Wednesday (16), also gives alternative terms or sentences that can be used.
Among the words and phrases that have been rejected are “slut”, “seductress”, “fallen woman”, “harlot”, “women of easy virtue” and descriptions such as “western woman”, “Indian woman”, “career woman” or “chaste woman”. All these terms should be replaced simply with the term “woman”, according to the book.
The apex court said its handbook looked at ensuring that “legal reasoning and writing is free of harmful notions about women”, The Guardian reported.
“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,” Chandrachud wrote in the handbook.
The chief justice also referred to one of the most sexist scenarios that can be witnessed in courtrooms: judges asking an alleged rapist whether he is ready to marry the victim on the basis that being a married woman will reduce her dishonour.
Chandrachud wrote in the handbook that marriage is not a remedy to rape.
He also slammed cultural beliefs that work behind rulings that suggest that women have certain inherent characteristics, like for example, they are more emotional than men or that all of them want children.
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.
Vrinda Bhandari, a senior lawyer in the supreme court, told The Guardian that she hoped the handbook’s guidelines would lead to a downstream effect on the wider Indian society.
It also cited Ranjana Kumari, head of the Delhi-bases Centre for Social Research, welcoming the handbook while saying that it was “long overdue”. Praising the chief justice for putting an emphasis on words, she told the outlet that when lawyers use terms such as slut or whore, it is a form of victim-shaming and will influence a woman’s legal fate.
