Severity Of Punishment Does Not Deter Crime, Certainty And Swiftness Do: Karnataka HC Chief Justice Vibhu Bakhru

Karnataka High Court Chief Justice Vibhu Bakhru has said that increasingly stringent penal provisions cannot by themselves deter crimes against women, stressing that the certainty, swiftness and fairness of punishment are ultimately more important than its severity.

Speaking at the South Zone Regional Conference on “Justice for Women”, organised by the National Commission for Women in association with the High Court of Karnataka and Karnataka Judicial Academy, Chief Justice Bakhru said India had an extensive legislative framework protecting women, but a significant gap continued to exist between legislative intent and enforcement.

“Criminology teaches us that it is not the severity of punishment but the certainty, the swiftness and the fairness of punishment that truly deter crime,” the Chief Justice said.

He noted that while conviction rates had gradually improved, they remained far from satisfactory, particularly in sexual offence cases.

Delays in investigation and trial, inadequate forensic support, hostile witnesses and poor evidence collection continued to weaken the criminal justice process, he said.

“The challenge before us is therefore not merely to enact stringent laws but to ensure proper investigation, effective prosecution and victim-sensitive procedures,” Chief Justice Bakhru said, adding that time-bound trials were essential to inspire confidence in the justice delivery system.

The Chief Justice placed the issue against what he described as deeply entrenched social attitudes towards women.

He said that while preparing for the address, he had come across surveys examining circumstances in which men believed physical violence against their wives could be justified.

“I was horrified to know how many men thought certain situations would justify women being physically beaten,” he said, referring to figures which, according to him, ranged between 42 and 65 per cent.

“This is a mindset that we need to change,” he stressed.

Chief Justice Bakhru said violence against women had to be understood across four principal “battlegrounds” where their safety was tested every day: the home, workplace, marriage and public spaces.

Perhaps most disturbing, he said, was that even the home remained unsafe for many women. Cruelty by husbands and relatives continued to constitute the largest category of offences against women, he noted, while domestic violence was particularly insidious because it remained hidden “behind the sanctity of family”.

While the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 recognised physical, sexual, emotional, verbal and economic abuse and extended protections beyond conventional matrimonial relationships, the Chief Justice said legal remedies frequently collided with social and economic realities.

An order of protection, he pointed out, meant little if a woman had nowhere else to go.

Chief Justice Bakhru also addressed the continuing problem of dowry despite decades of criminalisation. The Dowry Prohibition Act had been enacted in 1961, yet dowry-related violence continued to destroy families and undermine the dignity and autonomy of women.

He referred in this context to earlier concerns raised by the Law Commission and Justice Malimath Committee regarding matrimonial criminal litigation and the absence of restorative possibilities in certain cases. Turning to workplaces, the Chief Justice noted the significant increase in female labour force participation but cautioned that much of the increase was concentrated in informal, self-employed and unpaid work.

Participation, therefore, did not necessarily translate into secure, dignified and equitable employment.

Workplace sexual harassment also remained substantially underreported because of fear, stigma and lack of confidence in institutional mechanisms, he said.

Chief Justice Bakhru recalled that the Supreme Court’s Vishaka judgment provided a legal framework against workplace sexual harassment years before Parliament enacted the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act in 2013. However, implementation challenges persisted, particularly in the informal sector where millions of women worked without effective grievance redressal mechanisms.

The Chief Justice also dealt extensively with sexual violence in public spaces, recalling the 2012 Nirbhaya gang rape and the criminal law reforms that followed it.

The case, he said, forced the country to confront realities that statistics alone had failed to convey and ultimately led to significant amendments to criminal law dealing with sexual harassment, voyeurism, stalking, disrobing and acid attacks.

Yet, despite stronger laws, violence continued.

Chief Justice Bakhru said technology had now emerged simultaneously as an “instrument of empowerment” and a “weapon of abuse”.

Cyberstalking, deepfake imagery, online sexual harassment, revenge pornography and other forms of technology-facilitated gender-based violence represented new frontiers of crime, he said. Artificial intelligence, while creating opportunities for innovation, had also enabled new forms of abuse through deepfakes, impersonation and online exploitation.

The Chief Justice said the persistence of violence despite decades of legislative reform demonstrated that the reasons extended beyond inadequacy of law.

Entrenched social attitudes, economic dependence, unequal access to public spaces and institutions, delayed investigations, inadequate forensic support, low conviction rates and insufficient gender sensitisation within the justice system all contributed to the problem.

Referring to women’s safety data, Chief Justice Bakhru also highlighted the substantial gap between experiencing harassment and reporting it to authorities. He cited figures suggesting that only a fraction of women experiencing harassment approached authorities and an even smaller proportion saw concrete action following their complaints.

The result, he said, was a serious crisis of confidence in institutions.

India, he stressed, was not short of laws. Constitutional guarantees under Articles 14, 15, 39(d), 42 and 51A(e), alongside legislation dealing with dowry, domestic violence, workplace sexual harassment, trafficking and indecent representation of women, already provided an extensive framework.

“But there is a chasm between legislative intent and enforcement reality,” he said.

Chief Justice Bakhru concluded that the success of a justice system could not ultimately be measured by the number of statutes enacted or even merely by the punishment imposed after an offence.

“The measure of a civilized society is not in the number of statutes it has, but the confidence with which its women walk its streets, work in offices, travel on its buses and live in their own homes,” he said.

Justice, he added, was not achieved merely when an offender was punished, but when a woman could live without fearing that she would become a victim in the first place.