Public Secrets of Law: Rape Trials in India - Hardcover

Public Secrets of Law is an instructive and insightful read for law students, lawyers and activists. It reiterates the limitations of legal research that is focussed on appellate case law, an aspect law in-action scholars have highlighted, and emphasises the urgent need for legal scholars and jurists to go beyond it. (Sonal Makhija, University of Helsinki, Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society)

Sexual violence in general, and rape in particular, is under-reported in India. The social stigma associated with rape is the biggest hurdle that a rape survivor faces right from the time of reporting the matter to the police to the stage of trial. This book, one of the first ethnographic studies of rape trials in India, focuses on the everyday socio-legal processes that underlie the making of rape trials. It describes how state law is transformed in its localization, often to the point of bearing little resemblance to written law.

The work centres around four extended case studies in a trial court in Ahmedabad. These case studies show how the effects of power and knowledge congeal to disqualify women's (and children's) testimonies at different sites of state law such as the police station, forensic science laboratory, or the hospital and the court.

This book describes multiple ways in which public secrecy is subjected to specific revelations in rape trials that do not bring justice to a rape survivor but address and reinforce deeply entrenched phallocentric notions of justice.

Bringing sociological insights to the contested and anguishing issue of rape trials, this book is an essential read for all those committed to a just and safe society for women in India.