Delayed justice to limited aid: The long wait for domestic abuse relief

This month marks two decades of the domestic violence act. HT looks at what’s working on the ground, and what’s not

It’s another working day at judicial magistrate (first class) Shikha Chahal’s court 507 at the Saket district courts in Delhi. C is talking about the unravelling of her marriage in February 2007 when her husband hit her for the first time, two days after the wedding. She still doesn’t know why. “There was never a reason,” she said about the subsequent beatings. “His sisters told him to ‘keep me in line’. I guess that’s why he would hit me.”

The 2005 law defined domestic violence not just in terms of physical assault, but also mental and emotional cruelty, sexual violence and financial deprivation.(AP FILE Photo)

The husband, more body-builder than the real estate agent he is, sat on a steel bench outside, waiting to be summoned. He used to drive a Mercedes. Now he claimed to have no money to pay for the maintenance of their two daughters. In the last hearing, the court had asked for three years of bank statements. He submitted just the previous year’s. Seated behind a glass partition, looking down at the warring parties, the magistrate asked C’s husband to comply with her earlier order, and set a future date.

Every day, the six mahila courts at Saket bear witness to the efficacy of a 20-year-old law that was supposed to provide women with wide-ranging relief from domestic violence, from right to residence to maintenance and custody. Passed in September 2005, the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act defined domestic violence not just in terms of physical assault, but also mental and emotional cruelty, sexual violence and financial deprivation. It covered wives and widows, those in same-sex relationships and those never married. “There are many steps before going to court. We wanted to create those steps,” said senior advocate India Jaising.

“Before 2005, women would have to file five separate cases,” said Gargee Guha who has 25 years of field experience with Swayam, a Kolkata-based women’s rights organisation. “Now they came under the umbrella of one law.”

Speed was a crucial element. Under the law, 60 days was the time limit to sort out issues. But, in practice, it can take that much time for just the first hearing.

In one mahila court at Saket, the oldest case dated back to 2002 where the accuser was absconding; another 2,000 cases of varying vintage were pending.

In another court, the husband sought a fresh date because his father, a co-accused, had an upset stomach. Elsewhere, a wife was back in court after her husband stopped paying maintenance. And in a third, the lawyer hadn’t shown up — stuck in traffic apparently — and a fresh date was sought.

Not a priority

A new law required new infrastructure: Shelter homes for short-term stays and protection officers who would assist women approach the courts. Yet, two decades later, what was intended to provide speedy relief drags on.

“The idea of protection officers was to create an infrastructure where women could go if they had a problem. They were supposed to tell her, ‘I’ll come with you to the family and talk to them if you wish’,” said Jaising. But the government didn’t create a separate cadre as intended. Instead, “They gave bureaucrats additional charge and there is no one trained in how to deal with domestic violence cases,” Jaising said.

In states such as Jharkhand, anganwadi supervisors, whose primary duty is the nutrition of children, were tasked with additional work as protection officers, said Khadijah Farooqui, a lawyer, feminist trainer, and one of the consultants in the law’s drafting process. In Himachal Pradesh, the 200 or so protection officers are all contractual workers, she said.

The lackadaisical infrastructural support extends to one-stop centres launched in Delhi in November 2019 to help women facing gender-based violence. In June 2025, HT reported that many of these lacked basic amenities such as running water or a functioning fan. Many had no counsellors and core services such as police assistance, and legal aid were inconsistently available.

A 2015 survey of 704 one-stop centres across India by Delhi-based women’s rights NGO Shakti Shalini found 49% had phone numbers that were unreachable. Helpline 181, launched with great fanfare after the 2012 bus gang-rape in Delhi as a single point of contact for women in distress, now simply forwards calls to one-stop centres, Reporters Collective found in a 2024 investigation.

In the Capital, the Delhi Commission of Women (DCW) has been without a head ever since Swati Maliwal quit just before the 2024 general elections. In May 2024, Delhi lieutenant governor V.K. Saxena sacked 223 DCW employees for alleged irregularities. “I would say it’s going from better to worse,” said Monika Tiwary, survivor support lead at Shakti Shalini. “The checks and balances are vanishing.”

Police officers are not taught to deal sensitively with women survivors, said Tiwary, who is part of the training team: “Most are close to retirement age. It’s like they just want to tick a box that training was done; they are not really interested,” she said.

The problem, said Audrey D’Mello, programme director, Majlis Legal Centre, goes beyond infrastructure and over-burdened courts to a larger societal attitude when it comes to dealing with women’s issues.

“We don’t see them through entitlement but only through protection. There is actual hatred for a woman who asks for her rights. The very act of filing a case moves you from being a victim to becoming a horrible woman,” she said.

Advocate Abhijeet Dutta, who practises in the Kolkata district courts agreed. “Many judges lack sensitivity and I find that younger people are even less sensitive. There is an attitude among judges that women are misusing the act, and I’m sorry to say this, but this attitude is more prevalent among magistrates who are women.”

There were apprehensions from the beginning. Could a comprehensive domestic violence act that didn’t look at dismantling patriarchy and the subordinate status of women and girls, work? Like so many other laws, including dowry and the post 2012 rape amendments, domestic violence seemed doomed to fail because the accompanying social mindset change continues to be missing 20 years after it was passed.

“We expect society to progress towards equality. But that hasn’t happened in India,” said Jaising.

Not always about loving your family

K, who comes from a village near Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh, told me about her life as a girl growing up. “There was no freedom or mobility. I couldn’t wear jeans and a top; not even sandals, only chappals. If non-veg was cooked at home, I’d get one piece otherwise I might become ‘fat and spoilt’. I was never given enough to eat.”

There is a great deal of romanticisation about “loving your family” and stereotypes about the boundless nature of parental love. The domestic violence act recognised that this is not always true and, so, included violence from birth families. But there was limited awareness and often, the women themselves chose not to take legal action against birth families and looked for more informal resolutions.

In 2020, the Covid pandemic highlighted violence against women within the home. Suddenly, helplines, non-profits and even the National Commission for Women noticed a spike in distress calls. And, contrary to popular perception, not all abusers were husbands. There were fathers and mothers, siblings and grandparents. An August 2025 survey by Swayam found over 80% of the 50 or so women who had reached out to it had been subjected to some form of natal family violence even before marriage. The most common form was verbal and emotional abuse at 75%, followed by physical violence at 68% and child sexual abuse at 20%.

The forms of violence could be structural: The withholding of basic necessities, nutrition and healthcare, unequal distribution of housework and the denial of economic opportunities. Or it could be cultural which would include the marked preferential treatment of sons and controlling what daughters wear, restrictions on their mobility and forced marriage.

For those who live with disability, this violence was exacerbated.

“Families often perceive disabled daughters as lifelong burdens, stripping them of agency, infantilising them, and denying them autonomy,” found the report.

But for those who express sexual and gender identities other than hetero-normative—queer women, lesbian, bisexual and transgender women—the violence can take a particularly brutal edge with so-called conversion therapies, corrective rape, forced marriage and even the abduction of adult daughters from their chosen partners.

“The law makes it clear that natal family violence comes under the domestic violence law,” said Rituparna Borah of Nazariya, a queer feminist resource group. “So, it is absolutely infuriating that the administration and even feminist organisations tend to ignore the extent of violence that lesbian, bisexual, transgender women are subjected to.”

Borah told me of a case where a lesbian woman tried to file a police complaint against her abusive parents. “They told her ‘But this is for your own good’. Yet, if a married lesbian woman says her husband is beating her, they would understand,” she said.

“Nowhere is the tight control by parents, families and, by extension, communities, more evident than in the lives of queer and trans persons,” found a 2023 report prepared by a network of lesbian, bisexual and intersex (LBI) women as well as trans persons. Families are supposed to be spaces of nurture, care and support but, “Turn against their own children (often at very young ages), treat them with utter disregard and violence, and force them to conform to socially accepted ideas of what is “normal” without any regard to the individual’s dignity or personhood. Stigma and violence run deep within the space of these families that are assigned to us at birth (or adoption,” the report titled, Apnon Ka Bahut Lagta Hai (our own hurt us the most)

But natal family violence can take other forms. For instance, when a married

daughter complains about extreme and sustained violence at the marital home, very often her parents, assisted by community elders, insist she must ‘adjust’ and send her back. Demands for dowry are met not only at the time of marriage, but through it, in the name of gifts given by the parents of daughters during festivals as part of ‘tradition’.

Talking to men and boys

When data tells us one in three women is subject to domestic violence, then by extension, one in three men is committing that violence. “How do you begin conversations with men and boys who perpetrate violence perhaps because they know no better, perhaps because this is how they’ve seen their fathers talk to their mothers, perhaps because this is how it’s always been?” a male community volunteer who works on issues of gender-based violence asked.

When a boy grows up in a violent home, what is the message he receives? “The way their fathers treat their mothers shapes their attitudes,” Tiwary said.

When she ran away from home to marry her boyfriend from another religion, A knew she was cutting ties with her birth family. When he began hitting her, there was nobody she could turn to. This went on for many years until her sister called her out of the blue and eventually put her in touch with a non-profit. A was able to get a protection order for herself and her son. The beatings have stopped, she said, although she has no hope left from the marriage. She shrugged: “A woman can be happy with just roti and chutney, but she needs izzat [respect]. At least I have that now.”

If you or somebody you know is facing domestic violence and would like to seek help get in touch with:

National Commission for Women:7827170170 (24x7)

Shakti Shalini’s 24x7 helpline: 011-24373737 or Whatsapp: 7838957810

Sneha, Mumbai: 9167535765 (Mon-Fri, 10am-6pm)

Swayam, Kolkata, 9830079448, 9830737030 (Mon-Fri, 10am-6pm)

Nazariya, a queer feminist resource group, 9818151707 (Mon-Fri , 10am-5 pm)

Namita Bhandare writes on gender