Daanika Kamal, "Domestic Violence in Pakistan: The Legal Construction of 'Bad' and 'Mad' Women" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the new Books Network.

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Danika Kamal about her book titled Domestic Violence in Pakistan, the Legal Construction of Bad and Mad Women, published by Oxford University Press in 2025.

This book takes us into the Pakistani legal system and helps us understand how women victims are constructed in particular ways. I mean, we're going to be talking about those ideas of victim. We're going to be talking about what it means to be, quote unquote, bad, quote unquote, mad, and how these things are relevant and brought up in the context of courts and the law and cases. So a whole bunch of interesting things to get into here. Danika, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

Thanks so much for having me. Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? Yes, sure. So I'm currently a lecturer in law at Royal Holloway University of London. And my research looks at this sort of intersection of gender law and access to justice with a particular focus on domestic abuse and violence against women and girls in both criminal and family law contexts.

Prior to this, I worked for many years in my home country in Pakistan in the development and let's say law adjacent sectors. Particularly, I had been working alongside a team on a project that had established and supported numerous legal aid centers in two provinces through grants that essentially focused on access to justice for women and children.

And the book basically came about through my observations during field trips to those legal aid centers, where I would regularly sort of look at ongoing cases, you know, alongside the panel lawyers and managers to sort of help ascertain the legal needs of clients and whether or not those are being sufficiently met.

And it was essentially in those conversations and the case notes that I started noticing this pattern emerge, where in numerous instances, women's claims relating to domestic abuse and violence were being dismissed by the other legal party through several allegations, two of which were the most pertinent.

prominent, I'd say. The first was that, you know, the woman is a bad character, that she's immoral, having affairs, dresses immodestly, that sort of stuff. And, you know, subjectivizing women in this manner is quite a familiar patriarchal technique, I think that many of us would be quite familiar with across the globe. And the second allegation is the one that I felt

was a bit less familiar, at least to me at the time. And that was this idea that the woman complainant of domestic violence was mentally unstable. And this assertion was being made sort of through what I refer to as these psi labels in my book, which include things like psycho or crazy, or in Urdu, it would be, you know, nafsiati or zany maries, which is sort of mentally disordered or mental patient.

And at the time, you know, when I was questioning these sort of practices, I was told that the use of these sort of character allegations was just, you know, a common practice in the courts, particularly in response to cases relating to domestic abuse.

So it was against that background, you know, that the book took shape because I started questioning these practices and wanted to understand more about them. And I also realized that there isn't as much academic research that focuses on sort of everyday adjudication of court proceedings of domestic violence cases in Pakistan as a means of sort of, you know, cohesively reporting on the everyday lived realities of these women, right?

and their interactions with the legal system. So I wanted to look a lot more closely at these legal practices. I wanted to look a lot more closely at what is considered to be normal or common and therefore often ignored to try and question and explore, you know, why these women are being labeled in this manner and what the effects of that is. And that is what the book essentially aims to do. Hmm.

Okay, that's a very helpful introduction and very clearly lays out a trap that we do not want to fall into, which is assuming that we know exactly what these tropes are and not actually surfacing them and going, well, hang on a second. What does it mean when someone is called mad or bad in this context, especially obviously a woman in these courts? So can you tell us more what the kind of key elements are of these labels and how these tropes have developed? Sure.

If I may actually use a case that I think will help demonstrate this a bit better. So there was a case in 2015 where a man had essentially petitioned the district court in Karachi for permanent custody of his two children, which at the time was retained by his ex-wife.

And at previous hearings, she had testified to the mental, physical and sexual abuse that had been perpetrated by her husband during that marriage. So, for example, she had said that he had once pushed her against a wall and fractured her shoulder during an argument. And in another instance, he had forced her to have sex with another individual and essentially wanted to be present in the room to see the act.

So in response to her testimony, in response to her claims of domestic abuse, her ex-husband had submitted a statement that said, and this is a quote,

that he had provided a cozy life beyond the imagination of the respondent. He never injured her pride, never provided a chance of complaint, and asserted that from the very inception of marriage, she proved herself to be arrogant, bellicose, virago, jilt, slattern, belligerent,

found that she was under the influence of period medicine. And according to him, as she was mentally disordered, she could not retain the custody of the wards. Basically said that she was, quote unquote, a psychopatient and therefore was not qualified to retain custody. Also, there was something about her having a bad character, leading an immoral life. So a lot of different terms kind of thrown in there.

And what we see in this response is that the allegations of domestic abuse are being largely ignored. Right. Instead, the ex-husband is sort of responding by attempting to subjectivize this woman as, you know, being bad or being mad in an effort to perhaps impact her credibility when arguing, you

that she is unfit to fulfill her maternal duties. But the other thing to note, which I think is very important, is that in many instances, when these sort of psi labels are employed, right, when they say, when they're calling these women psychopathians or saying that she's a bad character, the thing is, specifically with the psi labels,

They're often accompanied by this assertion that the complainant needs this sort of, you know, psychiatric treatment. But there is little to no actual medical evidence that is provided that would speak to the complainant's mental incapacity in any way. Rather, you know, what we see is that these psi labels are being employed quite subjectively to sort of suggest that, you know, her claims of abuse are a product of mental illness.

and therefore should not be trusted. So that's the sort of basic idea that we're working with here. Okay, that's very helpful to have such an example to give us a sense of the sorts of things that you're looking at. And can you tell us a bit more about how you're looking at it? I mean, obviously, those were some quotes there. So you went into the courts, you took notes on what people are saying. I mean, tell us more about the methods behind this investigation. Yeah, so I think there was a two-part question that I was looking at. You know, the first was,

why these women are being labelled in these ways, why their subjectivities are being constructed in particular ways. And the second was how these subjectivities are then sort of captured and negotiated in the legal system. So the first part of the question is more theoretical. So it's looking more at the work of scholars such as Carol Smart, who work on law as gender that sort of aims to assess gender

how gender works within the law, but also how the law then works to produce gender. But then I'm also sort of expanding that concept to question how these processes, you know, may engage with gendering strategies and sort of other institutional undisciplined spaces, such as in the side disciplines, to sort of bring these, you know, constructed subjectivities into being. But

The second part of the question, the how question, is where the empirical work really comes in. And for this, I analyzed over 100 case files and judgments. I had over 70 interviews with

victims themselves, as well as lawyers, judges, police personnel. There were also a few opportunities that arose where I was able to talk to medical legal officers, legal aid managers, you know, managers of domestic violence shelters as well. So these are sort of grouped broadly under victim support personnel. But those were the interviews. And then I

I was also able to do some ethnographic court observations, particularly in the district and city courts of Karachi, Lahore and Assamba, so three cities. That is rather a lot of work that went into this, especially across, as you said, three pretty big cities. So what does this look like then in the court systems? What are the kind of key definitions and processes around domestic violence that we need to understand are relevant in the legislative and legal systems?

Yeah, so I'll give a bit of background here. So we had, so following devolution, this was back in 2010, domestic violence fell under the domain of provincial governance in Pakistan. And essentially since then, what we've had is that each of the four provinces have

instituted laws pertaining to women's protection within the home, within the family, starting with Sindh, that was 2013, then Balochistan in 2014, Punjab 2016, and then KP, which is most recent in 2021. And there are slight variations of understandings and definitions of

the kinds of acts of domestic violence that are covered under each of these provincial laws, but broadly they're quite similar and can be categorized under physical abuse, psychological and emotional abuse, sexual abuse, and then financial abuse. I don't think we need to go into the specific definitions in detail, but there are a few key things I think that we need to keep in mind about

that is quite in line with Pakistani culture as well, I'd say. And that is that, you know, these legislative developments have accommodated for things like joint family structures. So they have expanded the definition of what constitutes as a household, but also expanded definitions of who can be a perpetrator of domestic violence.

So, you know, the offenses can be committed by a person who is living or has lived in the same premises as the victim, whether they are related to one another through marriage, adoption, even employment, you know, any sort of other family relationship. It is quite broad. The Balochistan law, for example, actually extends it even to live in domestic staff.

The other thing to note is that while we do have these legislative developments, we do have these laws, they have not necessarily received a very warm welcome by the state. So the Council of

Islamic ideology, for example, which is a constitutional body, has deemed that domestic violence laws are un-Islamic. They've said publicly that, quote unquote, beating women lightly is justified. We've also had a federal domestic violence bill that was passed by the National Assembly back in 2021, but it was blocked by the Senate due to these concerns that it sort of, you

While we do have these provincial domestic violence legislations, and we are very thankful to have them, what we end up seeing is that in practice, there is a continued lack of implementation and prosecution through these laws, which...

leads us to a situation where a lot of domestic abuse cases are not necessarily prosecuted through these existing provincial laws, but are rather sort of found on a large spectrum of legal cases, both in criminal and family law. So under criminal, the criminal ambit, for example, we see domestic abuse come up often in, you know, murder, attempted murder, so-called honor killings, and

as well as numerous cases that are actually prosecuted through the hurt offenses of the penal code, which is a sort of umbrella term that we use for various acts that result in any sort of bodily harm. So, you know, asset crime, sexual offenses, all of that. And then under the family ambit, domestic violence tends to prominently feature in cases relating to, you know, divorce, dissolution of marriage, petitions for child custody, guardianship, all of that.

which is also why I look at this rather vast net of cases in my book. But the thing is, you know, apart from a few exceptions, these cases are not being classified separately as domestic violence, nor are they being necessarily petitioned under these relevant existing domestic abuse specific laws.

which brings us to this rather glaring sort of challenge of not only inaccurate classifications that, you know, ultimately can result in a loss of data, which we could use to sort of understand the prevalence and the processes around domestic violence cases more accurately. But I think

At the same time, you know, by looking at these sort of cases across this spectrum, there is something to be said about what these differing legal categorizations are telling us about the way that we are situating victims of domestic violence quite differently. You know, we're essentially making some of them more visible than others. So that was also an element that I was quite interested in during my research.

Yeah, that's definitely very interesting and important to note. So thank you for helping us understand how all these things are interconnected. California summer adventures are calling. Get out there and explore behind the wheel of a brand new Toyota Hybrid with 17 fuel-efficient vehicles to choose from, like the all-hybrid Camry.

But it's this point about the gap between kind of what's on paper and what happens in practice that I'd love to talk more about.

And because you mentioned there, obviously, in the legislative system, there have been kind of discussions and debates around, no, actually, we're going to block that. What does this mean on the ground, for example, with police officers? How are these legal provisions around domestic violence used or not? If, for example, someone goes to a police station with a complaint? Yeah, so you're absolutely right. I mean, there's a lot, there are a lot of challenges there, obviously.

I mean, during fieldwork, I think one of the sort of overwhelming notion was that policing practices are quite paternalistic. There was this idea that kept

coming up about how the police need to guide women, right? How women are often sort of incapable of making the best decision for themselves even, and how it is the duty of the police to sort of save the family and save the woman's marriage. There was one police officer that I interviewed who actually said that, you know, it doesn't matter how much violence there was. The amount of violence that a woman endures is irrelevant.

The idea was that with the husband-wife issue, any sort of official police report or FIR, as we call them, is not warranted because I remember this quote, if the police sort of register a formal complaint on behalf of the woman, then the house that is at the brink of breaking will definitely break. That was the idea that they had. And instead, the police feel it is their duty to actually

help this woman understand that, you know, violence or abuse in marriage is a small issue, right? It's a family matter. It can be easily resolved. And so police officers are often also pushing women to compromise or they're offering to supervise a reconciliation, you know, between the two parties, often without the woman's consent, right?

But I think in addition to this sort of more general approach, in my book, I also talk about this idea of disappearing women. So these are those women who come to the police station to find a case, but then because of specific, you know, specific sort of policing procedures or practices, they leave and then they don't come back. So I was trying to figure out, you know, where are they going? Why are they leaving? And,

And the few things that came up quite prominently with that, you know, the police are often, for example, seeking...

corroborative evidence from the complainant's male guardian or male relative before proceeding with filing a case. So when a woman comes, you know, whether she comes in for protection or she's coming in to file a case, the police are telling her, you need to come back with a male guardian. Only then are we actually going to listen to you. And that can be attributed to this sort of gendered suspicion around the female psyche that also came up a lot in my interviews with police officers, right?

And they often quoted, you know, that under Section 17 of the Pakistan's law of evidence, a woman's testimony is worth half of a man's in certain matters. But, you know, think of it this way, right? In cases of violence,

Spousal violence, for example, the perpetrators are the complainant's husbands. And, you know, in cases of domestic violence, the perpetrators could be their fathers or their brothers. And these are the very men whose presence the police are requiring in order to proceed. So it's not surprising then that women may decide to leave and not come back.

And the other thing is that, you know, for cases relating to domestic abuse, but particularly those that relate to physical abuse or rape or acid crimes, the police put a lot of evidential value on medical legal examinations.

Except that, you know, let's take the city of Karachi, where I'm from, for example, there are only nine medical legal officers who are women that are able to that are available to serve a city of 22 million people.

And what that means is that either the police tell women that they need to be examined by a male doctor with whom they, which, you know, may not be comfortable. Or then they are told that they need to leave and come back another day when a woman medical legal officer might be available. And I remember one case that was discussed during interviews where there was a woman who had been gang raped, right?

And when she went for a medical legal examination, she was examined by a male medical legal officer because there were no women officers available. And when she told the male doctor that she also had bite marks on her breast, he asked to see it. And she said no, that she was not comfortable showing him her breast because

And so he did not write this as evidence in the medical report, which meant that when the victim eventually mentioned it during her statement to the police, the police told her that she was lying because there was nothing of the sort in the medical legal report. There's just, you know, some examples of the kinds of challenges that women face, even at the very sort of initial stage of approaching the police.

Yeah, that's a very, very clear example of how all sorts of problems happen in this kind of first stage of the legal process. And of course, the issues continue. If we go, for example, into the courts, you have a really interesting discussion in the book that I wonder if we can talk a bit about around the decision of women to use the label of victim of domestic abuse rather than survivor of domestic abuse. What are the kind of calculations and factors that help influence that kind of decision?

Yeah, that is an interesting one. And it does tend to come up quite a bit. Again, I can only speak for the women that I interviewed. But what I found was that they generally disassociated from the term survival. And they chose to refer to themselves predominantly as victims, which is also why I refer to them as victims in the book.

I think the idea here was that the label did not carry any sort of negative connotation, but rather it was a way for their harms to be acknowledged, especially in a society where those harms are being constantly minimized and dismissed. Right. A lot of women told me that when they had confided, even in their family and their friends, about the abuse,

That sort of abuse and violence was often dismissed through this idea that, you know, it couldn't have possibly been that bad because, you know, she survived, she's alive. Or if I were to maybe say it differently, you know, Pakistani women might associate themselves more with the victim label rather than the survivor label because, you

Terms such as survivor or rather sort of adjacent sort of expressions of survival, so to say, are often used to tell women that they should be grateful to have survived, right, or that they should be thankful that the violence that she experienced wasn't worse, right?

And I also recall an interview with a medical legal officer, actually, where this was quite firmly communicated in response to my question about survivors of domestic violence. She said, I will not call them survivors. I'm going to call them victims. Also, many of them are killed. Many of them do not, in fact, survive. So there was something to be said about language and labels and

The fact that for these women, the label actually did provide them with some sort of validation. It provided some sort of acknowledgement for their harms that was being dismissed and minimized by all of them, all of the people around them.

That's really interesting and really helpful as well to kind of understand how these labels are being understood differently, right? Thinking about how victim in some ways is in the people you've just told us about kind of is alluding to a larger population of women, right? The ones who didn't survive, for example, and how that's creating kind of different ideas of like why to use a label or why to engage in a court case in the first place, right?

How then does this relate to the choice that women have made, obviously, to choose to use the legal system at all, given that there are a number of barriers you've already discussed to us? Like, what do they hope to get from it? Is it justice? Yeah. So I think I might answer this in two parts. I think the first sort of relates, you know, to the challenges that women face at, you know, each step of that legal process, you know, with the police we talked about.

you know, being unable to file complaints or being asked to come back with a male guardian and all of that. The second part is similar to the question, you know, you mentioned at the end there that I often get is, you know, what is the point of all of these laws if a lack of implementation means that women can't get justice? And to answer that question, I think we do need to look at what justice means for these women to acknowledge that,

justice may not look the same for all of them, right? Where instead of sort of largely focusing on outcomes, so instead of looking at the number of police reports that were filed or the percentage of favorable convictions, we can look at how women might be using the law in a strategic manner, right? As some form of resistance of a reflection of agency as well.

And the book, I talk about three ways to which women do this, broadly categorized as justice being seen first as simply a recognition of their harms. Second, then protection from those harms. And then third would be sort of the penalization or the prosecution for those harms. And what I mean by recognition to the first part of that is that women will often use the law as a way to get justice.

some sort of negotiating power, right? As if to say to their perpetrators that if you don't stop doing this, I will take you to court. Or if you don't stop doing that, I will call the police. And what that does is it essentially gives them a bit of negotiating power versus in situations where these laws may not have existed, right? So the laws are used almost as a

threat by women in a way that recognizes their harms, recognizes that what is happening is wrong. So, you know, sending a legal notice to the perpetrator, but not necessarily going through with the case. So that's the first way.

The second one is protection, right? Which sort of goes one step further where the law is used in a very protection-focused way rather than for legal rights. So for instance, in family cases, a lawyer that I spoke to

explain that many times women victims of domestic abuse will file for divorce or dissolution of marriage or khula because they really just want to get away from the man. So they don't necessarily want to pursue a criminal case. There could be a number of reasons for that. But essentially what they want is to use the law to sort of put some distance between themselves and their husbands to protect themselves.

And then the third one is prosecution, right? This is where the victims actually go to the police or to the courts very much with an intent to pursue a criminal case, which again, in some ways can be said to kind of, you know, encapsulate both the recognition and protection aspects, but then also goes one step further to sort of

seek some sort of reparation for those harms. So I think it's important to recognize, you know, that the law is still giving women the ability to exercise their agency in different ways because they might, the way that they see justice may be different. And because they see justice for themselves in different ways, they navigate the laws differently as well.

Okay, yes, that's very helpful to understand. And I want to talk more about this navigating the laws. You mentioned in the book a number of sort of templates that are employed once women have decided to engage with the courts. Can you tell us more about what this looks like? Yeah, so this was actually one of my main findings during fieldwork, you know, that these sort of character allegations that are broadly labeling these women as bad and mad women are being used to script, to essentially script them. And what I mean by that is that

legal actors are adopting certain practices in an almost one-size-fits-all approach in attempt to subjectivize these complainants in particular ways. And this was especially in relation to legal drafting. So to give some context, during my earlier interviews, a couple of lawyers that I was speaking to referred to the use of these templates in legal drafting and suits. And at the time,

I don't think I was quite grasping what they were referring to because I had sort of, I just sort of assumed or thought that the templates that they were talking about were, you know, formatted drafts to fill in relevant details of the case, you know, that considered a quote unquote standard legal practice. Um,

But it was as my interviews progressed that I realized that the templates that were being spoken about were a lot more fully drafted and that they already contained, you know, certain quote unquote facts about a case, although very much lacking in specifics, along with sort of these certain, you know, blanket allegations. And these boilerplate pre-drafted suits were very easily available in the courts to draftsmen

who charge lawyers a fee for this. So anywhere between sort of 500 to 1500 rupees per suit. And a family judge that I interviewed explained that the use of these sort of pre-drafted suits is a very integral part of everyday legal practice. And that the boilerplate grounds that are used in these sort of cases, especially when responding to allegations of domestic violence, always refer to, you know, the woman's character, refer to her mental state, that sort of stuff.

But what the judge also said was that she had had multiple instances where even the names of litigants had not been changed in these drafts when filed in her court. So essentially, these boilerplate suits and responses were simply being pointed out by the draftsman, you know, at the lawyer's request, and then being filed in the respective court at times without so much as a second glance.

And when I started exploring this practice more, I was advised by lawyers that, you know, the quickest way to spot those cases that are being filed using these sorts of, you know, boilerplate suits is going to be the lack of specificity in the text.

you know, the language used would be quite generic. There would be lots of sort of blanket statements and allegations, but there would be nothing specific about the relationship or nothing, you know, about the specific incidents, you know, between the two parties in that you can kind of

assess that the lawyer had not engaged with the client at all. And I also actually recall one interview with a lawyer relating to this. I think it was a divorce proceeding. And the other party's lawyer said that the woman was having an affair and that he had submitted a statement to the court to the same effect. And when the lawyer said this, the husband was completely shocked because he had no idea what even his own lawyer had filed on his behalf or what kind of allegations were being made on his behalf.

So these are the kinds of sort of very problematic lawyerly practices that, again, are seen very much as commonplace within the courts. And it's not just the paperwork, though I'm glad you've told us about the paperwork, because it is very clear that there are templates being used here in those examples. There's, of course, though, also the once it's filed, now you're in court. There's the whole kind of enacting of the law, the performance side of things. What does that look like?

Yeah, so once these sort of suits, you know, containing these allegations are filed, I talk a bit about how the lawyers are then almost using that as a script to sort of perform it, you know, or to enact it.

And this is usually done through, you know, restrictive questioning tactics, but also this employment of very interesting forms of evidence. And I'll give a few examples. There was a case from 2021 where a man had attempted to rape his seven-year-old stepdaughter. The victim was a minor. So the case had been filed by her mother, who was the wife of the defendant, but also herself had been a victim of domestic abuse.

And the defense team in that case had felt it was a lot more beneficial to discredit the mother as the main complainant. And they took the stance that the mother's mental state was not well and that she was taking medicines for her psychiatric issues and therefore was mistaken about what had happened to her daughter. And to support these claims,

They presented a pharmacy receipt as evidence of the medication that she was taking. And they simply asked her a guess or no question about whether that receipt was hers, to which she responded positively.

And her lawyer was completely unaware of the existence of this slip, but told me that, you know, she was unable to counter audio on the spot. And it was only after the hearing that she realized that that receipt was not for a medicine that sort of treats any sort of mental ailment, but was in fact for an emergency contraceptive pill, you know, dated like eight months prior to then.

And there was another case, but that was a similar practice use. So, you know, another lawyer that I interviewed mentioned that she was part of a domestic abuse case where the defense team presented a prescription for birth control medication, claiming that it was a psychiatric medicine.

And during cross-examination in that case, the woman admitted to taking the medicine daily, but she went on to provide context. You know, she went on to sort of clarify that the medicine had been prescribed to her by a doctor of reproductive health and not because of any sort of mental illness. And actually, her lawyer also rebut the sign of questioning quite aggressively, to which she was told by the judge to, this is a court, not prance such things around so openly in court.

So what we see happening in that instance is that, you know, when the woman's response

sort of affected the credibility of the defense's allegations that she was, you know, a mad evidence, a mad woman, and also sort of affected the credibility of the so-called evidence. They then adapted their claim to say that the medicine was evidence not of any sort of mental illness, but of the woman's immoral character because it related to birth control. And to this, then, you know, we see the sort of

The litigant subjectification almost fluctuating from the mad woman trope to the bad woman trope. So when I use the term script in the book, I don't only mean the sort of written scripts, as you mentioned, right? But also these very common performative practices that lawyers engage in an attempt to sort of narrate that and enact that script to the judge as audience. Yes.

This is very helpful to have you explain to us very much what's happening in the courts. And goodness, this word script, now that you've explained to us some of these examples, definitely seems pretty appropriate in these contexts.

I wonder now if we can zoom out a bit with this understanding of what's happening in the courts, some of the reasons that women are seeking this, some of the ways that these labels are being used. To what extent can we see colonial legacies as shaping this legal system?

Yeah, I think it's actually quite related. So, you know, because the legal language of the Pakistani justice system is English and that in and of itself is a colonial legacy, a lot of the sort of all of the court documentation is typically in English as well. But then on the flip side of that, you know, majority of the oral arguments and proceedings, you know, like we talked about, are all being done in Urdu.

And as a result, there is this sort of transcription process to which much of the context of these proceedings is lost, which means that not only are the sort of

harmful, gendering narrative strategies that defense lawyers are using, and also sometimes rather problematic comments made by judges themselves, these are not being captured in the recordings of the proceedings. But also when we look at the case files, a lot of times, you know, responses that a victim gives during class examination may be written as a statement. And the questions that she's asked are not always recorded.

And then that statement is not only translated from Urdu into English, but it's also written by hand and therefore summarized by the court clerk. So if we look at the examples that we discussed earlier, you know, so if a woman, for example, is being labeled as mad by the other party and answers yes when shown sort of a medical receipt and asked if she's taken that medicine, the recording of that information

interaction would simply state that the complainant admitted to taking medication, right? It wouldn't specify the nature of that medicine. And that could then feed into the judge's perceptions and discretions when sort of revisiting case notes, because neither the context of that medication nor its relevance to her mental state is provided in the recording.

And another very interesting finding, again, kind of sticking to the language bit, because I think that that's quite an important one, is that for judges, a litigant who is conversing in English could amount to a perception of mental soundness. And this too is often connected to the scolonia legacy aspect. So one of the lawyers that I spoke to mentioned that in a previous case, a

When the other party has alleged that his client was mentally unstable, he told his client that no matter what she is asked, she should respond in English because it frazzles the judge.

And when I asked the lawyer what that meant, why would it frazzle the judge? He said that, you know, English is given a superior status in our society. And those who speak English are perceived to be educated, smart and quote unquote normal, especially for judges in the lower courts. There's also this idea of status that comes into play. Right. And then all of this is sort of linked to this perception of mental soundness.

And a judge that I interviewed a bit later in the field work also reiterated this idea when he was telling me about a custody case that he had presided upon following a divorce case that was filed with domestic violence.

But in that case, the husband had essentially alleged that the wife was not mentally fit for custody. And the judge said, would have a quote here, that he didn't personally consider it much because he could assess her himself. And she was responding properly and speaking very well in English. And so he had no reason to question her mental soundness.

Compare this idea with another instance from an interview where a judge, when speaking about a case that he had come across, mentioned to me that the woman in that case looked mentally ill to him because she had, quote unquote, an abnormally large head.

And so judicial perceptions are really playing a big role in these court proceedings as well. And I think the English, the language part specifically, is a very, very interesting point to note, given that we do have our legal system is essentially a colonial legacy. And the fact that the English is our legal language and all of this, you know, the fact that we are not only legal,

expecting litigants to speak in English, which a lot of times they are unable to. But then that transcription and that translation process and the issues that that brings along with it is also a very important part to look at. Yeah, no, definitely. I'm glad you highlighted that here. What can be done to improve all of this going forward? Oh, that's a big question. Um,

So I think if we sort of stick to the examples that we discussed for a minute, you may have noticed that, you know, the medications that were being presented in support of these Psy labels typically related not to mental health, but to women's sexuality, right? In the form of emergency contraceptive pills, birth control pills, or even, you know, period medicine, as it was called in one of the cases, right?

And they're also sort of presented alongside, you know, suggestions of immorality then, right? So what we need is,

it sort of indicates the need for procedural safeguards to sort of prevent the use of information that is not directly connected to the facts of the case and could be perhaps facilitated by requiring the defense to provide a very clear demonstration of how such evidence is pertaining to the case at hand rather than sort of simply serving as a sort of vehicle for moral judgments as it is right now.

But I also mentioned that, you know, majority of these sort of character allegations and side labels are included in,

the pre-drafted boilerplate suits that are sort of very easily and readily available for filing in response to domestic abuse claims. And in family law, particularly, there is a significant portion of legal practitioners that seek the drafts, you know, the services of draftsmen in the courts. And that reliance on the sort of boilerplate text is diminishing, you know, the quality of

and the individuality of legal representation, which sort of leads to this copy-based approach. But having said that, you know, when I kind of in hindsight, when I reflect back to my time in the field, I do think that there was an acknowledgement of these practices by judges and lawyers. And it is perhaps within those spaces of acknowledgement that we can find potential to try and challenge these

the system, you know, whether it's by lawyers mentoring junior colleagues on accountability or by judges sort of setting higher standards of case filings within their own courts. But I think more broadly, we also need to acknowledge the fact that, you know, the expansion of domestic violence definitions to include

psychological and emotional abuse reflects a very important and necessary change with respect to how the law responds to the reality of victims' harms, right? Given that domestic abuse has been historically quite largely understood only in terms of physical violence, with the level of physical harm being the primary measure of that abuse.

when we incorporate the sort of broader scope of abusive behavior within domestic violence definitions, we are getting a much more comprehensive framework to address it. So, you know, similar to understandings, of course, of control in relationships in the UK, for example.

But given that the provincial laws, even in Pakistan, do identify things like a pattern of degrading and humiliating conduct as falling under the ambit of domestic violence. And Punjab and KP define psychological and emotional abuse actually on the basis of the impact that it has on the victim. So specifying that acts that result from

in mental health illnesses or disorders. You know, things like suicidal attempts or clinically proven depression are all considered to be acts of domestic violence.

So my point is that, you know, while these sort of expansions are very crucial to acknowledge the full scope of coercive relationships and very much speak to the complex relationship that does often exist between domestic abuse and mental health, these laws also leave us with some questions about how evidence for the same would be perceived by the court, you know, or put differently, you

Given that the Punjab and KP laws require mental health illnesses to be an outcome of the abuse, if women bring forward proof of that diagnosis before the judge, would that be seen as proof of the abuse that she experienced? Or would it sort of fuel these defense narratives that aim to construct her as a mad woman? Right. So that is a big question that I think needs to be addressed. And

I think we also need to note that even in instances where there is evidence to suggest that the complainant is battling some sort of mental illness as an outcome of the domestic abuse, the nature of that illness may not have any substantial bearing on the case at hand, right? In that a woman may be diagnosed with depression, which despite being, you know, recognized mental illness,

may not have any sort of impact on her ability to recount events or her ability to be a good mother, all of those things that the defense is claiming, right?

And the findings of my research illustrate that the decisions of judges, you know, based on this sort of quote unquote common sense, is likely to not only overestimate their own understandings of mental illness and the impact of mental health factors on the case, particularly, you know, the absence of expert testimony, but

But given that sort of discursive impact of Psy Labels on the subjectivity of victims, many lawyers that I interviewed said that they actually choose not to introduce any sort of medical evidence relating to

the clinically diagnosed mental health impact of domestic abuse on the victim, right? Because if they introduce it to the court, they felt that the diagnosis would be misused as proof of that psi label being applied to her as a defense strategy instead of being seen as proof for the violence that she experienced, which again sort of

illustrates this troubling tension between the use of Psy labels to sort of undermine women's claims and the complex relationship that does often exist between domestic abuse and mental health. And to that effect, I think the fact, this sort of deployment of Psy labels as a gendering strategy is essentially doing a disservice to that very complex relationship.

And so I guess my final point would be, you know, what does that tell us about maybe having to reassess how legal definitions of domestic abuse are being perceived and applied in practice so that victims are able to sort of acknowledge the full scope of their harms without having them weaponized essentially by the other party? Hmm.

Yeah, definitely a whole lot to keep thinking about in this area. Is it something you're continuing to work on now that this book is done? Or do you have other next projects? Anything you want to give us a sneak preview of?

Not necessarily. I'm still in the space, so I think my focus will also always sort of remain on gender justice. There are a few different things I'm working on at the moment. The first is actually establishing a social legal research network on gender justice that sort of centers the perspectives of scholars working on the Global South, which we hope offers a platform for more inclusive and

and globally representative research, and also sort of contributing to the advancement of feminist perspectives, but particularly Southern feminist perspectives within UK academia.

And the second is sort of identifying and challenging this growing trend in mobile gaming ads in the UK that are exploiting sexist themes, often, you know, portraying women in demeaning ways, normalizing aggression, perpetuating gender stereotypes, that sort of thing for user acquisition. And then looking at how these trends can inform legal frameworks, sort of governing advertising standards, right?

And the third one is a collaborative project. It's actually quite a big collaborative project that we're quite excited about that is exploring the lived experience of ethnic minority and migrant women in East London and the barriers that they face when accessing maternal and reproductive health care in England.

And on a more personal note, my husband and I are also expecting our first child. So that's a whole new adventure to come. Yeah, that's a whole bunch of different kinds of projects, even before you add a whole big personal one as well. So best of luck to you and of course, your husband and your academic collaborators on all that lies ahead. Thank you so much.

While you're off doing all the things, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Domestic Violence in Pakistan, The Legal Construction of Bad and Mad Women, published by Oxford University Press in 2025. Danika, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Nice to get it for having me, Miranda.