The Supreme Court on Wednesday launched a handbook on combating gender stereotypes to help judges avoid inappropriate use of gender-related terms in court orders.
In launching the book, Chief Justice of India, DY Chandrachud, said: “It is about prejudice against women in legal discourse. It identifies the patterns used by the courts and how they are used unintentionally. This is not to denigrate judgments. This will help the examiner avoid recognizing language that leads to stereotyping. It highlights binding decisions that highlight the same thing."
The manual lists various terms judges should avoid using in the future so as not to discredit the judgments or the judges who wrote them.
For example, it would be inappropriate to call a woman an "adultery" but instead "a woman who has sex outside of marriage".
The use of "contact" in the court order may be replaced by "non-marital relationship". Calling a wife "wife" is also called inappropriate and from experience should only consider the wife "wife".
Likewise, the use of the word rape should be changed to simply "rape" and instead of "housewife", "housewife" should be used. "Whore" should be changed to "prostitute", "bitch" is now an incorrect word and should be changed to "single woman". “Single mom” refers to mother and the word “whore” should also be avoided and replaced with “just woman”.
"Templates influence our thoughts and actions towards others. They prevent us from seeing the individual in front of us as a single person with their own characteristics and cause us to make incorrect assumptions about them. Stereotypes can prevent us from understanding the reality of a situation and can cloud our judgment,” the manual says. "Patterns affect the fairness and intellectual rigor of judicial decisions when they cause judges to ignore or circumvent the law or distort the application of the law to particular people or groups. ."
“Even when justices are legally correct, the use of reasoning or language that promotes gender stereotypes undermines the unique characteristics, autonomy, and dignity of individuals. in court. "equal protection of the law", which stipulates that the law must be applied uniformly and without bias to every individual, regardless of which group or group they belong to. The judge's use of stereotypes also has the effect of reinforcing and perpetuating patterns, creating a vicious cycle of injustice," the manual states.
