The Victim Who Wasn't Allowed to Exist

In August 2026, a court overturned a rape acquittal because the trial judge had, in effect, punished the survivor for not performing trauma correctly. But a courtroom in Jaipur, thirty-one years earlier, had denied a woman victim status for a completely different reason - not her behaviour after the crime, but her caste before it. Same myth. Two entirely different machines for producing it. ## PRIVILEGE AS SHIELD: THE TEJPAL CASE Nils Christie's 1986 theory of the "ideal victim" holds that society only readily grants victim status to those who fit a script: weak relative to the offender, engaged in respectable activity, blameless for their circumstances, unacquainted with their attacker and harmed by someone who is unambiguously "big and bad." The theory's quieter half matters just as much - the "ideal offender" must be a stranger, framed as purely dangerous, someone society finds easy to dislike. When the accused instead has a good background story, the entire architecture strains. Tarun Tejpal, former editor of Tehelka and a recognised liberal intellectual, was exactly the wrong shape for an "ideal offender." His 2021 trial court acquittal - overturned by the Bombay High Court in August 2026, which called the original ruling "perverse" - leaned heavily on the survivor's composed demeanour in CCTV footage and inconsistencies in her account, rather than the evidence itself. The High Court's own language is the clearest diagnosis available: the trial court had "fallen for the notion that a sexual assault complainant must be a 'perfect victim.'" Here, privilege operated by making the offender difficult to see as a offender - his social status and reputation absorbed the doubt that should have gone toward examining the evidence and that doubt was redirected onto the survivor's conduct instead. ## CASTE AS EXCLUSION: THE BHANWARI DEVI CASE Move now to a genuinely different mechanism, operating on a genuinely different axis. In 1992, Bhanwari Devi, a Dalit social worker in Rajasthan, was gang-raped by upper-caste men after she tried to stop a child marriage in her village. When the case reached the Jaipur District and Sessions Court in 1995, the acquittal did not turn on her behaviour, her composure or inconsistencies in her testimony. It turned on caste itself: the court reasoned that upper-caste men would be unlikely to "pollute" themselves by assaulting a Dalit woman. Her victimhood wasn't undermined by failing to perform trauma correctly - it was foreclosed before any evidence was even weighed, because her caste status made her structurally illegible as someone such men could plausibly have targeted, in the court's own logic. This is not a variation on the Tejpal mechanism - it is a different mechanism entirely. Tejpal's case shows privilege protecting an offender by making him hard to see as dangerous. Bhanwari Devi's case shows caste hierarchy denying a survivor victim status by making the crime itself seem, to the court, structurally implausible. One operates through the offender's social capital; the other operates through the survivor's social position, independent of the offender's conduct at all. The Mathura custodial rape case of 1979 sits closer to this second axis too - the Supreme Court's acquittal rested on the survivor's prior sexual history and caste-adjacent social marginality being read as consent, not on anything about her post-assault behaviour. ## SYNTHESIS Hold these two mechanisms side by side and something becomes visible that neither shows alone: the "ideal victim" myth is not one bias correctable by one fix. It is a structural principle that adapts to whatever hierarchy is locally available - class and reputation in one courtroom, caste in another - and produces the same outcome, a survivor denied credibility, through opposite routes. This is exactly why the Supreme Court's recent push for gender sensitivity in judicial writing, welcome as it is, cannot be the whole answer. Sensitising judges against reading a survivor's composure or inconsistent testimony as doubt addresses the Tejpal-style mechanism. It does nothing to address a court reasoning from caste hierarchy that a crime was structurally implausible in the first place - that requires confronting caste bias as its own distinct problem, not a symptom curable by generic gender sensitisation training. Real accountability, in other words, has to be built for both mechanisms separately, because a myth that adapts to whichever hierarchy is locally strongest will always find the gap that a single, generic fix leaves open.