# India’s legal system fails survivors of gender-based violence: report 2026-08-24T10:59:41+00:00 | Governance | Indian Opinion Desk Corroboration: 1 independent outlet India has some of the strongest laws on gender-based violence, including constitutional equality guarantees, POCSO, and the new Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) that replaced the IPC in July 2024. But a sustained gap between law and practice means survivors often face secondary victimisation through the justice process itself: insensitive police responses, repeated questioning, hostile courtrooms, and drawn-out proceedings. The BNS retains a chapter on sexual offences, with Section 63 defining rape, the BNSS creates statutory schemes for victim compensation and witness protection under Sections 396 to 398. Yet reporting remains the first major barrier. Fear of stigma, retaliation, economic dependence and disbelief discourages survivors, especially in intimate-partner cases. Even when survivors come forward, a delayed or harsh institutional response deepens distrust. The Supreme Court has recognised that earlier procedures could cause secondary victimisation in child sexual offence cases. Experts note that trauma responses, delayed disclosure, fragmented memory, continued contact with a perpetrator, must not be judged against stereotypes of a 'genuine' victim. Training for police, prosecutors, medical professionals and judges is needed for the law to become protection rather than another source of trauma. ## Indian Opinion Analysis The gap between law and implementation in India is not new: the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO), passed in 2012, has faced similar criticism of poor enforcement in successive government reports. What is at stake here is the credibility of the entire justice process for lakhs of survivors annually. The structural problem is that police, prosecutors, medical staff and judges operate with little mandatory trauma-informed training, and compensation schemes under the new criminal codes have not yet been backed by adequate state-level budgets. A concrete signal to watch is whether the National Crime Records Bureau's next annual report will show a rise in conviction rates alongside the rise in reported cases under the BNS rape chapter. ## Coverage - livelaw.in Leads with law-on-paper gap, blames implementation, police response and secondary victimisation without praising government effort. This story was synthesised by AI from the source linked above. Tags: Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, National Crime Records Bureau, POCSO, Supreme Court Canonical: https://indianopinion.org/indias-legal-system-fails-survivors-of-gender-based-violence-report/ License: Summary and commentary (c) Indian Opinion, reusable with attribution. Facts belong to the linked sources. Cite: https://indianopinion.org/indias-legal-system-fails-survivors-of-gender-based-violence-report/#story-in-brief Review state: restored archive article, accurate at time of publication, not offered to search indexes. How this brief was made: an AI model read the report linked above and wrote this summary and analysis, which were published automatically. Published briefs are sampled every hour by an automated quality check; the editor verifies its findings and approves corrections, and corrected briefs carry a dated correction line. We do no original reporting. Methodology: https://indianopinion.org/ai-use-policy/