Survivor-Centric Justice In Sexual Assault Cases: A Critical Socio-Legal Evaluation Of India's Criminal Justice System
Shirvi Goyal, LL.B. (Hons.), Law College Dehradun, Faculty of Uttaranchal University.
ABSTRACT
Sexual assault violates bodily integrity, personal autonomy, and human dignity in some of the worst ways a legal system has to deal with. India has passed major reforms namely, the Criminal Law (Amendment) Acts of 2013 and 2018, and now the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 and courts have kept building on them. But punishing offenders was never going to be the whole answer, and survivors in India are still waiting on justice that goes beyond a conviction. The Supreme Court, for its part, has done real work here: reshaping what consent means in law, protecting survivors’ privacy and dignity, calling out gender stereotypes in how cases get handled, and pushing procedures to be more victim-centric.
This paper asks a fairly direct question: has India's criminal justice system actually become survivor-centric, or does it just look that way on paper? To answer it, I used a doctrinal and socio-legal approach reading through constitutional provisions, statutes, and landmark Supreme Court judgments (drawing on SCC reports) to map how the law has changed. Alongside that, I ran a survey of 150 people, asking what they knew about sexual assault law, how well they understood consent, how much they trusted police and courts, what they thought about how survivors get treated, and whether they'd be willing to report an assault themselves.
What the research shows is that the law has gotten better, but the system hasn't caught up. Reforms have given survivors real rights on paper, but delays, weak forensics, stigma, and the risk of being retraumatized by the process itself keep undercutting them. I'd argue survivor-centric justice can't just mean conviction rates it has to include how investigations are conducted, whether trials are fair, whether survivors get psychological support and compensation, and whether institutions are actually held accountable when they fail.
Keywords: Sexual Assault; Survivor-Centric Justice; Criminal Justice System; Consent; Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023; Victim Rights; Socio- Legal Study.
