Introduction
The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005 was a landmark in Indian social legislation, providing for the first time a civil law remedy for victims of domestic abuse that went beyond the criminal complaint under Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code. The Act recognised that domestic violence encompassed not only physical abuse but emotional, economic, sexual, and verbal abuse, and that the existing criminal law framework was an inadequate and often counterproductive response to the complex dynamics of abusive relationships. It created Protection Officers, Shelter Homes, Service Providers, and a range of relief mechanisms including Protection Orders, Residence Orders, Monetary Relief, and Custody Orders.
The Act was gender-specific by design: only women could be complainants, and relief was available only against a “respondent” who was a person in a domestic relationship with the complainant. As enacted, the definition of “respondent” in Section 2(q) included any adult male person, though a woman could also be a respondent if she was acting in concert with an adult male respondent. This design reflected the legislative intent to address a form of violence that is overwhelmingly perpetrated against women and that has specific gendered dimensions rooted in power imbalances within marriage and the family.
The question of whether the Act’s gender-specificity is constitutionally sustainable, and whether male victims of domestic abuse are adequately protected by existing law, has become an increasingly contested question in Indian family law discourse. This article examines the constitutional arguments, the judicial response, the data on male domestic violence victims, and the comparative experience of gender-neutral domestic violence legislation, to assess whether India should reform the Act or supplement it with gender-neutral provisions.
Legal Framework
The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005 is explicitly limited in its scope to women. Section 2(a) defines the “aggrieved person” as any woman who is, or has been, in a domestic relationship with the respondent and who alleges to have been subjected to domestic violence by the respondent. Section 2(q) defines the “respondent” as any adult male person in a domestic relationship with the aggrieved person, with the proviso that a complainant may also implead relatives of the husband or male partner as respondents.
The constitutional basis for a gender-specific protective statute lies in Articles 14, 15, and 21 of the Constitution. Article 14 guarantees equality before the law, but Article 15(3) specifically permits the state to make special provisions for women. A statute that provides special protection to women is therefore facially valid under Article 15(3) as an exception to the equality guarantee of Article 14. This is the standard justification for the DV Act’s gender-specificity, and it has been consistently upheld by the courts.
The alternative legal framework available to male victims of domestic abuse includes: Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code (now Section 85 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023), which is gender-specific for the accused (husband or relatives) but may in some readings protect male victims of cruelty by female relatives; the general criminal law provisions on assault, hurt, and grievous hurt under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023; and the Family Courts Act 1984, which provides a gender-neutral forum for matrimonial disputes including claims arising from abusive relationships.
Judicial Developments
The most significant Supreme Court pronouncement on the DV Act’s gender-specificity came in Hiral P. Harsora v. Kusum Narottamdas Harsora (2016), where a two-judge bench struck down the words “adult male” from Section 2(q) of the Act. The judgment was not about male complainants but about female respondents: it arose from a complaint by a mother and daughter against other female relatives, and the High Court had dismissed the complaint on the ground that Section 2(q) permitted only adult male persons to be respondents. The Supreme Court held that the limitation to adult males was arbitrary and read down Section 2(q) to permit women to be respondents, on the basis that domestic violence could be perpetrated by female relatives as well as by male ones.
The Harsora judgment opened a limited space for rethinking the Act’s gender architecture, but it did not address the question of male complainants. The Act’s definition of “aggrieved person” was not challenged in that case and remains limited to women. Subsequent petitions seeking to include male complainants within the Act’s scope have not succeeded, with courts consistently holding that the Act’s gender-specific design is a valid exercise of the Article 15(3) power and that male victims have adequate alternative remedies under the general criminal law.
The Kerala High Court in several orders between 2020 and 2024 dealt with applications by men who had suffered what they described as domestic violence by wives and wives’ families. These courts generally declined to apply the DV Act to male complainants but in some cases acknowledged the lacuna and recommended the filing of complaints under general criminal law provisions. The Delhi High Court similarly acknowledged in 2022 that the existing legal framework did not provide male domestic violence victims with an equivalent of the DV Act’s civil remedies, but declined to extend the Act by judicial interpretation.
The BNS 2023, which replaced the IPC and came into force in July 2024, has not introduced gender-neutral domestic violence provisions. Section 85 of the BNS (corresponding to the old Section 498A IPC) retains the gender-specific formulation targeting cruelty by the husband or his relatives, and Section 86 provides for punishment of the husband for causing death due to such cruelty. Male victims of marital cruelty do not have a corresponding specific provision.
Contemporary Issues and Analysis
The empirical dimension of the debate about male domestic violence victims in India is contested and politically charged. The National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5, 2019-21) includes data on spousal violence experienced by both men and women, and the findings show that a non-trivial percentage of men report having experienced physical violence from their spouses. The precise figures are debated, partly because male victims are significantly less likely to report such violence and partly because the survey methodologies have been criticised for creating comparison problems. Nevertheless, the data is sufficient to establish that male domestic violence victims exist and that the law’s current treatment of their situation is inadequate.
The feminist argument against gender-neutralisation of the DV Act rests on several grounds. First, domestic violence remains overwhelmingly perpetrated against women in terms of frequency, severity, and lethality, and a gender-neutral law would dilute the resources, attention, and institutional infrastructure dedicated to female victims. Second, making the Act gender-neutral would enable abusive husbands to weaponise its provisions against their victims by filing retaliatory complaints, a concern that has been borne out in some jurisdictions that have adopted gender-neutral frameworks. Third, the gender-specific design of the Act reflects a substantive understanding of domestic violence as rooted in patriarchal power structures that operate differently when the perpetrator is female.
These arguments have considerable force, but they do not fully address the situation of male victims. The question is not whether domestic violence against women should receive less attention or fewer resources, but whether the law should leave male victims without any equivalent civil remedy. A binary choice between gender-specific protection for women and gender-neutral protection for all is not the only option available: a hybrid framework that maintains the existing DV Act for female complainants and creates a separate but comparable civil remedy framework for male complainants and children could address the gap without disturbing the primary structure.
Comparative and International Perspective
Scotland’s Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018 is one of the most progressive domestic violence statutes in the world and is gender-neutral in its application. The Act creates a specific offence of a “course of behaviour” that is abusive of a partner or ex-partner, covering physical, sexual, psychological, financial, and coercive abuse. The gender-neutral formulation was deliberate: the Scottish Government took the view that the law should protect all victims of partner abuse regardless of gender, while acknowledging that the vast majority of cases would involve male perpetrators and female victims. The Act has been in force since 2019 and has been used overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, to prosecute male perpetrators.
England and Wales address domestic abuse through the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, which is also gender-neutral in its application. The Act created the offence of coercive or controlling behaviour in intimate or family relationships (which had originally been introduced in 2015), established Domestic Abuse Protection Orders and Notices, and created the office of Domestic Abuse Commissioner. The gender-neutral framework has not been accompanied by any significant diversion of resources from female victims and has enabled some male victims to access formal legal protection that was previously unavailable to them.
The United States’ approach to domestic violence is primarily regulated at the state level and varies significantly, but the federal Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), while named for women, has since 2013 been interpreted to include all victims of domestic violence regardless of gender in its federal grant and protection provisions.
Practical and Policy Implications
The practical implications of the current framework for male victims are severe. A man who is subjected to physical abuse by his wife or her relatives has no access to Protection Orders, Residence Orders, or the other civil remedies that the DV Act provides to female complainants. He can file a First Information Report under general assault provisions, but this is a far more adversarial and stigmatising process than the civil remedy framework of the DV Act, and it does not provide equivalent immediate protective relief. He can approach the Family Court for matrimonial remedies, but the Family Courts Act does not provide the specific injunctive protections available under the DV Act.
The stigma associated with male domestic violence victimisation in Indian society means that male victims are even less likely to report abuse than female victims, and the absence of a civil remedy framework designed with their specific needs in mind reinforces the message that their experience is not taken seriously by the law. Protection Officers designated under the DV Act are trained to assist female complainants and do not extend services to male complainants.
For children who witness domestic violence in households where either parent is the perpetrator, the current gendered framework creates anomalies in how the same household is treated depending on the direction of abuse, which is difficult to justify from the child’s welfare perspective.
Suggestions and Reforms
The most defensible reform in the Indian context is the enactment of a Domestic Abuse Protection Act as a companion legislation to the existing DV Act, rather than an amendment to the DV Act itself. This companion Act would: be gender-neutral in its application, covering male and female complainants equally; apply to the same categories of “domestic relationships” as the existing DV Act; provide the same range of civil reliefs, including Protection Orders, Residence Orders, and Monetary Relief; create a separate cadre of Protection Officers or expand the existing cadre to handle both sets of complaints; and explicitly provide that a complainant under the companion Act may not simultaneously use the companion Act complaint as a shield against a complaint by the same person under the original DV Act.
The concern about retaliatory complaints from abusive husbands could be addressed through careful drafting of the companion Act’s anti-retaliation provisions and through magistrate-level gatekeeping that requires an initial assessment of the genuineness of the complaint before protective relief is granted.
Section 85 of the BNS 2023 (cruelty by husband) should be supplemented with a companion provision addressing cruelty by a wife that goes beyond the existing general law provisions on assault and hurt, recognising that gender-based psychological and financial abuse within marriage can be perpetrated by either spouse.
Conclusion
The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005 is a pillar of India’s family protection framework and should remain intact as a gender-specific instrument focused on the overwhelmingly predominant form of domestic violence, namely violence against women. But the existence of male domestic violence victims, however much smaller in number, is not a reason to leave those victims without an adequate civil remedy. The constitutional equality argument for a companion gender-neutral framework is strengthened, not weakened, by the Act’s specific protections for women: equality before the law does not require identical treatment, but it does require that comparable needs receive comparable legal responses.
The Scottish and English experiences demonstrate that gender-neutral domestic violence legislation does not dilute the protection available to female victims and can be designed to minimise the risk of retaliatory misuse. India’s legislature has the models, the constitutional framework, and the social data to build a hybrid system. What has been lacking is the political will to acknowledge that male victims of domestic abuse are a constituency whose needs deserve legal recognition alongside, and without prejudice to, the priority claims of the overwhelmingly larger population of female victims.
