Like this girl, living with her elder brother in his marital home at Kalyan in Maharashtra. She was continuously molested by him during the nights, she fought back. He raped her at knife point. A few nights later, when he attempted to rape her again, she screamed. He threw her out of the house. That was in 1985, her case came up for hearing on 14 February 2000. She stood up in court after fifteen years and said, ‘I have not given any statement to the police, the contents of the first information report are not true.’

In 1986, a complaint was filed in Mumbaii that fifteen-year-old Bhuvaneshwari had been raped by her stepfather when her mother had gone to Nagercoil in Tamil Nadu to visit her married, elder daughter. The case came up in court in March 2000, the rape victim is now twenty-nine years old, married and with two children of her own; she reverses her statement in court.

Even if there is no reversal of statement, the child is not adult as yet, the mother of the child pursues the case because justice must be done and truth must prevail, her doggedness can meet with emotional death. In a Child Sexual Abuse case in May 1996, a judge of the apex court declared that mothers who allege such crimes against the father of a child are ‘mentally sick’ and are ‘unnecessarily spoiling the child’s future prospects for marriage and a happy life’. In another case, a sessions court judge dismisses the allegation as one of a ‘promiscuous imagination’.

The worst case to date has been that of Mehra versus Mehra, the judgement of which was delivered on 31 July 1996. Nowhere in the judgement is the mother’s point of view mentioned, thus if a student of law has to read it as a case study, or a lawyer has to look it up in the way it is listed in the legal books which discuss cases and their outcomes, this case would appear quite contrary to what it actually was.

This is what actually happened. The woman from Delhi, living with her husband Mehra and their child in America, discovers that her husband is sexually abusing her daughter. She approaches the police there who medically examine her child and confirm the abuse. She confronts her husband, he does not stop sexually abusing their child. An overwrought woman gathers her daughter’s things, she runs away from America on a flight to Delhi and the safety of her own family.

This is how it is seen through the judgement, as quoted in Sakshi’s Purple Report. ‘The tone of the judgement is determined by its opening observations on Child Sexual Abuse: “Some eerie accusations have been made by a wife against her husband.” From the outset the perspective of the court is that “incestuous sexual abuse” by a father is “incredulous”. Such disbelief ultimately governs the court’s unquestioning acceptance of one version (the father’s) and unequivocal dismissal of another (the mother’s). The mother is described as a “vengeful” woman merely because she spoke of her marriage as “extremely painful and unhappy”. The assumption being, women in unhappy marriages have no recourse but to falsely accuse fathers of sexually abusing their own children. The worst outrage is the father’s allegation that the mother herself molested the child to implicate him. That allegation was used to counter the finding of an Indian paediatrician that “on examination of the genitals of the child . . . a wide vaginal opening—wider than would be expected of her age group” was present. Surprisingly, the court chose to ignore the paediatrician’s finding as well as a first police report filed when the family was in America which stated that the complaint of Child Sexual Abuse was “founded”. Instead the court accepted the father’s oral—repeat, oral—submission that an American doctor said the child had not suffered such abuse. No document was ever filed to support this submission.’