The Punjab and Haryana High Court has asserted that “lewd, filthy and indecent questions” cannot be put to rape victims and it should not be allowed by trial courts.

Hearing appeals filed by accused on August 20 in an alleged sex scandal, Justice Arvind Singh Sangwan observed that while conducting cross-examination on behalf of accused, their counsel had put certain questions which, in opinion of the court, could not be asked of a rape victim to prove the innocence of the accused.

Justice Sangwan pointed out that while conducting the cross-examination of victims of sexual assault, the court should be vigilant that defense counsel should not adopt a strategy of continuing questioning the prosecutrix as to the detail of the rape. The Court should not sit as a silent spectator while the victim of the crime is being cross-examined by the defense, and it should effectively control the recording of the evidence, he observed.

Justice Sangwan directed the High Court Registrar General to circulate the observation of the judgment regarding “a lewd, filthy and an indecent question put to the prosecutrix, which could not be allowed by the trial court” to all the Presiding Officers and designated courts dealing with cases of crime against women in the States of Punjab and Haryana and in the Union Territory of Chandigarh.

Citing the Supreme Court’s judgment in the case of Punjab Vs Gurmit Singh, Justice Sangwan quoted: “There has been lately a lot of criticism of the treatment of the victims of sexual assault in the court during their cross-examination. The provisions of Evidence Act regarding relevancy of facts notwithstanding, some defense counsel adopt the strategy of continual questioning of the prosecutrix as to the details of the rape. The victim is required to repeat again and again the details of the rape incident, not so much as to bring out the facts on record or to test her credibility but to test her story for inconsistencies with a view to attempt to twist the interpretation of events given by her so as to make them appear inconsistent with her allegations....A victim of rape, it must be remembered, has already undergone a traumatic experience and if she is made to repeat again and again, in unfamiliar surroundings, what she had been subjected to, she may be too ashamed and even nervous or confused to speak and her silence or a confused stray sentence may be wrongly interpreted as ‘discrepancies and contradictions’ in her evidence.”