Survivors of sexual harassment walk on a double-edged sword in dealing with society (including agents of law) and law itself while seeking legal redressal. Accepted societal silence on violation of a woman’s modesty and bodily integrity when coupled with legal silencing through state sanctioned laws such as media censorship, defamation suits, and threats of identity disclosure results in an unsettling reality. This legal reality equally affects and alters the lived reality of the survivors of sexual harassment within the Indian legal community.
This paper draws from one’s ethnographic fieldwork done in Delhi’s courts between 2016 and 2020 and reflects on the persistence and affect of these two forms of ‘silence’ enveloping lawyer-survivors of sexual harassment within and outside courtroom complexes. I divide this paper in three parts and begin with an examination of the concept of ‘silence’, both societal as well as legal, around sexual violence. In the second part, I connect silence and legal silencing with a socio-legal analysis of three cases of sexual harassment against former judges of the Indian Supreme Court and a high-profile defamation suit resulting from the 2018 MeToo Movement in India. The third part relies on sections from the in-depth interviews conducted with first generation Delhi-based lawyer-survivors that talk about the alternate resolutions they adopt to negotiate with the legal system while safeguarding their professional lives.
The paper establishes that legal silencing is a form of violence perpetrated by the State on the survivors of sexual harassment who choose to seek legal redressal.
