What's So Objectionable About Wife-Beating?

When a woman petitioner appeared before Karnataka High Court Justice K. Bhaktavatsala seeking divorce from her physically abusive husband, the judge's response made national news — and not in a good way.

"Women suffer in all marriages," the judge reportedly told her. "You are married with two children, and know what it means to suffer as a woman. Your husband is doing good business, he will take care of you. Why are you still talking about his beatings?"

He wasn't done. "Ask your father if he has never beaten your mother!" he added, according to widely reported accounts. "You have to adjust." He then cited Kannada actor Darshan — who had spent 30 days in jail in 2011 after beating his wife — as an example of a couple that had reconciled and was "living together now," as though reconciliation were the measure of justice.

The remarks, made orally in open court in early September 2012, detonated. A Mumbai-based human rights activist launched an online petition to the Chief Justice of India demanding the judge's removal. Women's rights groups and the press piled on. Within days, the Karnataka High Court stripped Bhaktavatsala of family-law matters — every family case listed before him was reassigned, though his other cases remained with him.

The episode landed because it crystallized something the International Center for Research on Women highlighted in its September 7, 2012 response: India's domestic violence crisis is not only a problem of perpetrators, but of institutions. India had passed one of Asia's most comprehensive domestic violence laws, the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act of 2005 — covering physical, emotional, sexual, verbal, and economic abuse, with protection orders and residence rights. Yet here was a High Court judge, in the very institution meant to enforce that law, telling a woman that being beaten was normal and that her real problem was her attitude.

The willingness to confront these attitudes publicly — and the fact that a judge faced professional consequences for them — was itself a form of progress. But as the outrage faded, the harder question stayed: how many quieter versions of the same advice were being handed out in courtrooms that never made the news?