Stop Expecting Women To Be Perfect Victims

There is a peculiar figure summoned repeatedly in sexual violence cases — the “perfect victim”. She should be frightened but not hysterical, traumatised but coherent, angry but not vindictive. She reports promptly, remembers everything, cuts off contact with the accused, and, at every turn, behaves in ways that confirm what institutions already believe a victim should look like. Real women, inconveniently, rarely oblige this crass imaginary.

The Tarun Tejpal case has once again brought this contradiction into sharp focus. In 2021, a Goa sessions court acquitted Tejpal, who had been accused of raping a young colleague in a hotel elevator in 2013. The judgment scrutinised the complainant’s conduct before and after the alleged assault, including her messages and behaviour, and observed that she had not demonstrated “any kind of normative behaviour” that a victim of sexual assault might plausibly display. The court also reasoned that her messages showed she was neither “traumatised nor terrified”.

On August 6, the Bombay High Court overturned that acquittal, convicted Tejpal of rape and sentenced him to 10 years’ rigorous imprisonment. In doing so, the court rejected the premise that a woman’s credibility can be measured against a prescribed script of victimhood. But the “perfect victim” is not merely a legal problem. She is a social construction.

We have built a cultural grammar of sexual violence in which a “real” victim is expected to behave in recognisable ways. The problem is not only that these assumptions are nonsense. It is that they turn a woman’s attempts to survive, process or make sense of violence into evidence against her. And women are angry about this.

In 2014, Newslaundry published Nirupama Sekhri’s ‘Letter to Ms Tehelka-Assault-Victim’, a piece so steeped in victim-blaming that it is difficult to read even now. Sekhri wrote that she did not see the complainant as a victim, questioned why she had not kicked or punched Tejpal, called her a “bubblegum feminist” and described the alleged assault as a “small occurrence” that had been turned into an “ultimate felony”. What is enraging about that disgusting letter is not only its utter cruelty. It is the audacity of the demand it makes of the woman, shamelessly so, to explain why you did not behave correctly while you were being violated.

We have heard these questions in too many rooms, directed at too many women, for too many years. In courts, in newsrooms, in universities, in workplaces, in families. They often arrive disguised as questions of fact. But underneath them is another scrutiny to find a victim whose behaviour makes the violence easy for us to chew and digest.

The perfect victim, after all, is part of a larger obsession with female perfectness. The perfect daughter knows when to be quiet. The perfect wife knows when to forgive. And the perfect victim knows how to suffer in ways that leave nobody uncomfortable. As hard as it might be for you to believe, we women are complex and messy humans, too. And there is no single psychology of trauma. Yet institutions and society at large, repeatedly, desperately, search for one.

That is the utmost cruelty at the heart of the perfect-victim demand. A woman is denied her humanity twice. First, through the violence itself and then through the endless interrogation of what she did, said, drank, remembered, forgot, felt or failed to feel afterwards. The violence happens to her and, still, somehow, the burden of making sense of it is handed back to her.

And perhaps this is what should make us furious. We have spent years teaching women how to avoid violence, how to dress, where to go, when to leave, whom not to trust. When violence happens anyway, we again turn to them, teaching them something else now — how to explain themselves in a manner which is digestible. How to make their pain coherent. How to be believable. How to become the kind of woman whose suffering will not inconvenience anyone. Enough!

Women do not owe anyone the performance of devastation. They do not owe anyone the right reaction, the right memory, the right amount of anger, the right amount of fear. A just society would not ask a woman to first become a perfect victim before it is willing to confront the violence done to her.

The writer is a researcher based in New Delhi