Bengaluru: He was her tuition teacher, and over four months till January 2025, he allegedly attacked her sexually, attempting to commit “peno-vaginal penetration” on his 15-year-old student.

When the mother of the 15-year-old sexual assault survivor first approached the police this year, soon after discovering what was going on. Instead of filing a first information report (FIR)—as the law requires—the police called in the suspect, sat him across the child he had assaulted, and asked her to confront him. 

The suspect’s wife stood by him, aggressively vouching for his innocence. “The police disbelieved me and spoke in an abusive manner,” the mother recalled. “They sent us home without any help.”

“Victims should be trusted and believed,” said the mother, who is a domestic worker. 

“They should be treated kindly and with respect,” she said. “The entire process should be done quickly, and the victim should not have to be called repeatedly to repeat her story.”

Navigating India’s justice system is difficult even for the privileged; for those without such protections, it’s nearly impossible. 

A Bridge Too Far

Legal aid, a state-provided service for those who can’t afford private representation, is meant to bridge that gap. It’s a constitutional mandate, a public right, and a crucial pillar of democratic functioning. 

Yet, it routinely ends up failing survivors from marginalised communities.

In theory, legal aid exists to support survivors of sexual and gender-based violence in their pursuit of justice. In practice, for survivors from socio-politically marginalized backgrounds, the idea of this justice can feel like an elaborate performance designed to exclude them. More so, if their perpetrators are wealthier, better connected, and socially protected. 

Meanwhile, the survivors face procedural hostility and a bureaucracy that forces repeated reliving of trauma.

Inconvenient Survivors

The inevitable retraumatisation by state institutions is baked into the system, where survivors are seen as unreliable, dramatic, and simply too inconvenient to protect.

Often, there are adverse consequences, too, for survivors and their families. 

“My daughter was very scared,” said the mother of the 15-year-old. “I was scared for my family as I had to go to work and leave them alone. I was afraid of the backlash from the accused and the neighbourhood, so I left the locality.” 

The South Asian Movement for Accessing Justice (SAMAJ)—a regional coalition of 17 individuals and organisations from Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and the Maldives working with survivors of gender-based violence—published a report in May 2025 showing how community backlash and legal hostility increase survivors’ vulnerability.

“These failings discourage many from seeking justice and enable perpetrators to avoid accountability,” Nawmi Naz Chowdhury from Equality Now, SAMAJ’s Secretariat, was quoted as saying in the report. 

“While state legal aid exists, it remains out of reach for many,” said Chowdhury. “Women and girls often don’t know about services, and if they do manage to get legal aid assistance, systems are slow, complicated, and regularly fail to meet the specific needs of sexual violence survivors.”

The Toll Of Pursuing Justice

The mother of the 15-year-old was eventually able to register the FIR with help from Mumbai-based Majlis Legal Centre, which provides legal support and guidance to survivors of gender-based violence seeking to access their rights and pursue justice in courts. 

Despite legal assistance, the survivor and her family had to uproot their lives to stay safe, driven by another man’s actions. Evidently, the toll of pursuing justice was not only emotional and legal, but also spatial and economic.

Audrey D’Mello, the director of Majlis, recalled another case of an 11-year-old girl who was sexually assaulted by her own father (according to NCRB data from 2015, 27% of rapes were committed by neighbours and 9% by immediate family members and relatives). 

Here, too, an FIR was filed, and the matter proceeded to court without resistance until, on a hearing day, the accused told the judge the case had resulted from a personal family conflict between him and his wife. Based on this claim, the court granted him bail midway through the trial. 

The survivor is now 16. The case remains unresolved, and the father, who was released years ago, continues to harass her and her mother and, in fact, often fails to even appear at hearings, too.

“While most laws mandate that cases should be resolved within a stipulated time frame, it rarely does, adding to the tension,” said Julie Thekkudan, South Asia consultant with Equality Now. “With cases taking a very long time to reach a logical conclusion, it becomes draining for survivors and their families.” 

Thekkudan explained how, “previous traumatic experiences of survivors could lead to both mental and financial exhaustion, leaving them with the feeling that they may be a burden on their families”.

The message, she said, was that “the system is not meant for them and that women are always second class citizens”. 

The Burden Of Institutional Failure

Delays are common even in relatively ‘successful’ cases. 

In one instance, a three-year-old was sexually assaulted by a staff member at her school, and upon the child’s mother filing a police complaint, the immediate consequence for them was hostility from the school authorities and trustees. And after the complaint became public—courtesy of irresponsible reporting by the media—the child was forced out of school. 

Though the accused was eventually convicted—a decade later—the child and her mother had long been forced to relocate, restart, and carry the burden of institutional failure. “Even though in the end we got a conviction, the mother felt like it was a very hard victory,” said D’Mello.

Dr. Shivangi Gupta, a psychologist and assistant professor at Christ University in Bengaluru, who has worked closely with survivors from socio-economically marginalised communities, spoke of “a big gulf of information,” and the legal process rarely being explained in ways that survivors—often juggling poverty, caregiving, or illiteracy—could understand. 

As a result, even when survivors do engage legal aid, they often do so blindly, left to navigate unfamiliar procedures alone. 

“There is also gatekeeping of information because women are assumed to be emotional, dramatic, or not literate enough,” said Gupta. “And so lawyers often don’t break things down in ways that survivors can understand.”

For survivors, this dynamic becomes a cruel catch-22. The process requires faith in a system that has already failed them, demands strength from people already depleted by trauma, and expects clarity from those who’ve been intentionally kept in the dark.

Enabling Perpetrators

Legal hostility isn't limited to silence or inaction. In many cases, it actively enables perpetrators, too. 

D’Mello noted that bail is often granted without assessing the ongoing threat to the survivor. “Courts don’t think of these dynamics… They only think of it as: ‘someone applied for bail, and the Supreme Court says bail should be granted.”

In such a system, survivors end up fighting against being retraumatised by the very institutions meant to protect them.

The criminal justice system appears to function without ever really accounting for the lives, voices, and agency of young girls from marginalized communities. It applies a one-size-fits-all approach that reflects its own prejudices, failing to recognize the diversity of survivors’ experiences and needs. 

When laws and institutions operate on assumptions rooted in dominant caste, class, and patriarchal perspectives, legal aid is reduced to nothing more than a formal procedure; people it claims to serve are never truly seen or heard. 

This is the concern with the criminal justice system’s treatment of adolescent relationships under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act 2012, which, in practice, often fails young girls from marginalized backgrounds. 

How The Law Fails

A recent case from rural West Bengal—where a 14-year-old girl, ostracised by her family, eloped with a 25-year-old man and later gave birth to his child—vividly illustrates the law’s failure. 

Though she consistently sought reunion with him, the man was convicted under the law and sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment after her mother set the legal machinery in motion. 

In May 2025, the Supreme Court eventually stepped in to undo the sentence, citing the woman’s continuing emotional and financial distress, and a collective failure of the systems.

Such failures are not rare. 

In 2018, a 16-year-old in Bengaluru gave birth in a toilet cubicle at a government hospital after unknowingly carrying a pregnancy. Her encounter with the classmate she conceived with was consensual, but after hospital authorities informed law enforcement, he was charged under the POCSO, and she was drawn into a lengthy legal process that left her emotionally and socially drained. 

“I lay the blame for a lot of this at the door of Parliament… By raising the age of consent, they have ensured such cases of consensual sex being called ‘rape’ are just going to multiply,” Vrinda Grover, women’s rights activist and lawyer, told The Hindu. 

These cases expose how India’s legal infrastructure struggles to distinguish between protection and control—conflating consent with criminality, and morality with legality, and leaving the most vulnerable young people crushed under its weight. 

Until the justice system, including legal aid mechanisms, is rebuilt to reflect the lived realities of survivors, especially those from structurally disadvantaged communities, justice will remain a promise on paper, not a right in practice.

A New Support System

Experts and practitioners agree that the way forward isn't just about more lawyers or more laws. It's about designing survivor-centered support that meets people where they are, and not just on paper.

“Women who don’t leave abusive relationships are also judged harshly, not understanding that it's extremely difficult to leave,” said Gupta.

“Unfortunately, a lot of times, that frustration is taken out on the woman, who herself is taking a big step by even approaching someone for legal support.”

Support needs to be consistent, comprehensible, and compassionate. Survivors need time, space, and continued access to help when they are ready, not just when the system is.

But one of the fundamental flaws with India’s legal aid system is that it’s treated as an afterthought rather than an essential public service. As a result, it runs on overburdened lawyers and prioritizes case disposal over justice. The gap becomes most evident in gender-based violence, where trauma-informed legal support is crucial but rare.

India spends less than Rs 1 per person on legal aid, among the lowest globally. The result is a skeletal system where legal aid lawyers often earn as little as ₹5,000 a month, lack basic infrastructure like chambers, and don’t get reimbursed for expenses. 

Many are forced to choose between sustaining a private practice or staying in legal aid, which is poorly paid and poorly respected.

This results in poor legal representation and no mechanism to centre survivors, especially women.

Lawyers’ Struggles

One school of thought argues that legal aid lawyers should serve out of social duty since the job is about public service, not profit. 

Such moralizing ignores the material realities of lawyers struggling to sustain themselves when they are paid less than a daily wage worker for complex legal work that stretches across months or even years. 

Moreover, many panel lawyers report being sidelined in court proceedings, where their presence is seen as a formality rather than that of an equal officer of the court. 

“I believe, if there can be any credible acknowledgement of our work, in the form of bonus or award or anything, this can encourage us to continue,” said Naman Jain, a panel lawyer at Saket district court. “But reality is, we don’t even get acknowledged at court hearings.” 

“The kind of treatment a regular or a private lawyer gets in front of a judge or magistrate, we don’t even get half of that attention or priority,” said Jain. “There’s no respect for our free legal service.”

So, talented, committed lawyers are pushed out of the system because the structure offers them no way to survive, let alone thrive.

When that happens, survivors are retraumatised by a system that’s neither equipped nor incentivised to help them. 

Invisible To The Law

Legal aid rarely addresses language barriers, caste bias, or rural realities  either—rendering entire groups, some of whom face the highest risk of violence and the lowest chance of justice, invisible to the law.

“In South Asia, women and girls from socially excluded communities are often at higher risk of being subjected to sexual violence as compared to other communities due to the use of rape as a weapon of suppression and to perpetrators’ awareness that they are unlikely to face justice,” said Thekkudan.

Fixing legal aid, then, requires a fundamental reimagining of whose realities the justice system is built to serve, said experts. 

Survivors—especially those who live at the intersections of caste, class, gender, and age-based vulnerability—need support that’s not just legally competent, but also socially attuned, culturally aware, and structurally responsive.

This means making legal aid multilingual, gender-sensitive, and accessible even in the remotest corners, said experts, while simultaneously training lawyers and judges to understand trauma, and shifting from a narrow focus on conviction rates to a broader view of survivor wellbeing.

But for any of these reforms to take root, the legal system must perform one simple, radical act: listening. 

“Currently, I am being called to different locations, and my daughter has to repeat the story multiple times,” said the mother of the 15-year-old. “We are tired.”

But she still doesn’t regret her decision to report the perpetrator. “This person could be doing this to so many people,” she said. “It is important for me, and especially for my daughter, to get justice.”

(Devrupa Rakshit is an award-winning independent journalist and a former lawyer.)

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