Hidden victims, open wounds

India's new criminal code still defines rape solely as a man assaulting a woman, rendering male and transgender survivors legally invisible. Their cases remain unrecorded, untreated, and unpunished, thereby creating a dangerous systemic blind spot, reports Venkatesh R.

Disbelief, shame, silence — survivors of sexual violence grapple with an array of emotional and psychological shocks. For male and trans survivors, the burden is heavier still: the law does not even acknowledge that they can be victims.

India rewrote its British-era criminal laws in 2024, replacing the Indian Penal Code with the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS). Yet what remained untouched was its imagination of who a rape survivor can be. In the eyes of the law, that survivor is still only a woman.

Under Section 63 of the BNS, rape is defined solely as a “man” committing the act against a “woman.” Men and most trans people simply do not exist in that definition. They disappear before the law even begins to speak.

This isn’t a drafting slip — it’s a worldview. Advocate K M Sai Apabharana, partner at Allied Law Practices, explains that when male or transgender survivors report sexual assault, they are pushed into provisions meant for “hurt,” “grievous hurt,” or “criminal force.” None of these captures the sexual nature of the violence, and the penalties are far lighter. “They provide limited legal avenues for redress,” she says.

What the law refuses to name, society refuses to see. In police stations, courtrooms, and even therapy rooms, survivors who are not women are met with disbelief, laughter, or silence. Their trauma doesn’t fit the statute, and so it doesn’t count.

Arvind Narrain, lawyer and co-founder of Alternative Law Forum, spells it out more bluntly: “The victim is gender-specific… the only person who can be subjected to sexual violence is defined as a woman.” That single clause narrows the entire legal imagination, pushing survivors outside the frame before they can even report a crime.

The result is legal improvisation. “If the sexual-violence part is out of the picture,” Narrain says, “then you’re left with assault, grievous hurt, hurt, criminal intimidation”. None of these, he points out, comes close to naming sexual violence for what it is.

Not just this. Apabharana points to the age gap that cleaves protection in two: under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, a 17-year-old boy can be recognised as a rape victim, but the moment he turns 18, the law abandons him. One day, you are a victim; the next day, you are invisible.

Both lawyers describe what that invisibility looks like on the ground. “Procedurally, these social and legal gaps often result in hesitation or uncertainty at the stage of FIR registration,” Apabharana says. Police are unsure which section to invoke; prosecutors hesitate to take the case. Institutions meant to support survivors “find it challenging to respond effectively.”

The silence that follows is not incidental. It is built into the law.

A law that erases, a record that forgets

Every year, the National Crime Records Bureau tallies up ‘Crimes Against Women’. Pages of charts, graphs, and conviction rates are all neatly arranged. But there is not a single line for men or transgender survivors. They do not exist in the data because they do not exist in the law.

Narrain agrees that this is not just a data problem. Our legal imagination has completely kept men and trans persons outside the framework. We have built a culture of impunity, that too a critical kind, solely targeting a specific set of communities, leaving them completely vulnerable. 

Apabharana notes that because the statute itself is gender-specific, even data collection is skewed. You cannot measure what the law refuses to see, and that erasure shapes public attitudes. The absence of recognition fuels harmful stereotypes, which survivors then internalise as shame, fear, and the expectation of disbelief. All of this discourages them from reporting.

That blind spot sustains a vicious cycle: without data, there is no visibility, and without visibility, there is no reform.

And that invisibility shows up in the numbers — or rather, in their absence. A 2024 working paper from the Centre for Law and Policy Research found that more than 94% of Indian States and Union Territories reported zero cases of sexual violence against men or transgender persons. 

A 2025 study by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and the Queer & Allied Research Network found nearly seven in 10 male survivors never sought formal help, citing fear of ridicule and “lack of a proper legal provision”. Among trans persons, it was eight in 10.

Counsellor Mahesh Natarajan, who works with queer and trauma survivors, says the damage runs deep. “The absence of legal recognition and the social silence around sexual violence on male and trans persons disenfranchises this suffering,” he says. “It makes the suffering invisible and the victims objects of ridicule and shame.”

Silence isn’t a choice

For most male and transgender survivors, silence isn’t a choice — it’s survival. When the law does not recognise your pain, even therapy starts to feel like rebellion.

Raghav (name changed on request), a 29-year-old survivor from Bengaluru, still remembers the question that ended his search for justice. “It wasn’t about the act,” he says. “It was about that moment when someone takes your power away.” After the assault, he quit boxing — the one thing that had kept him grounded. “You can’t tell your friends because you’re supposed to look like a man,” he says. “You can’t tell the person you’re dating because it’s not considered… attractive. So you just carry it. Forever.”

For him, his family’s disbelief cut deeper than the assault itself. “The man who did this was my mother’s brother,” he says. “I told her, and she said I was imagining it. That broke something in me. After that, drinking was easier than feeling.”

He explained what this kind of trauma does to an adult who grew up with it. “It eats into your self-worth. You carry this feeling that you’re hiding something, all the time. It shows up everywhere — in work, in relationships. And there’s guilt, like you’ve done something wrong.”

During the pandemic, he says, an unexpected conversation pulled those memories back to the surface. “I was dating someone who, out of nowhere, told me she’d been abused as a child,” he says. “It was the first time she’d said it out loud, and the first time I heard someone else say it. That’s what triggered mine.”

Then came the observation that exposes a wider, quieter truth. “People think this happens only to the poor, the uneducated, people in red-light areas,” he says. “But it’s happening everywhere — in offices, in corporate circles, among people who seem in control. That’s what makes it so easy for predators. The shame, the stigma, the fear of losing everything — that’s what keeps them safe.” 

Adil (name changed on request), a 27-year-old trans man from Bengaluru, describes the same pattern of isolation — just through a different lens. “People don’t understand what it means to be violated when you already live in a body the world doesn’t fully accept,” he says. “I didn’t even know what to call it — rape, assault, violation? The police didn’t know either.” When he finally approached a station, the officer asked, “But what are you, exactly?” Adil never went back.

Like Raghav, Adil found his pain eating into his everyday life. “You start avoiding mirrors. You start thinking the body is your enemy. And you stop believing anyone will ever understand.”

Natarajan says such stories are far more common than most people realise.  Their dismissal, however, leaves scars that outlast the violence. “Male and trans survivors face a deeper psychological trauma,” Natarajan says. “We see self-shaming, self-harm, distorted sexual health, punishing behaviours, even survivors turning aggressors themselves.”

Inside therapy rooms, he adds, healing begins with being believed. “For many queer survivors, therapy becomes what families and systems are not — safe,” he says. “As queer therapists, we work to break stigma and help survivors reframe their story — not as victims, but as people reclaiming their lives.”

However, even healing has its limits when the world outside remains unchanged. “When people can’t access support or work on their trauma with community-based resources, the trauma stays in their bodies,” Natarajan says. 

The law may refuse to name it, but trauma has its own voice — in fear, in anger, in the way survivors learn to move through rooms like ghosts. “Sexual violence,” Natarajan says, “is war waged within our own society. If justice and support aren’t available to all survivors, the loss belongs to all of us.”

Reinforcing biases

India’s rape law doesn’t just reflect bias; it reinforces it. The message is simple and brutal: only women can be victims, only men can be violators.

In Bengaluru, activists say India’s rape law does not just reflect bias but reinforces it. “The law sees us as an afterthought,” says transgender activist and Supreme Court-appointed advisory committee member Akkai Padmashali, who has spent years fighting to widen that definition. “It says protection is only for a woman, but what about us? Are we not human beings? Are we not citizens of this country?”

For Padmashali, this fight is not just about legal reform; it is about existence itself. “When we go to the police, they don’t even understand what we’re talking about. They don’t know which section to file under, and half the time, they laugh,” she says. “For the state, our pain doesn’t exist. For the public, we’re a joke. So where do we go?”

Even language, she says, becomes its own violence. “Everything about rape in our laws is written in binaries — man and woman. But consent is a human thing, not a gendered thing. The law should be based on consent, not gender.”

Feminist activist Madhu Bhushan agrees that India’s imagination of sexual violence is trapped in “a patriarchal, heteronormative frame”. But she warns against a simplistic fix. “If you make rape law completely gender-neutral in a society that’s still patriarchal, it can be turned against women,” she says. “The power dynamics are not equal yet.”

Padmashali disagrees. “When the law denies you recognition, it denies you justice,” she says. “We keep talking about equality, but equality has to include everyone, not just the majority gender.”

Activist Manohar Elavarthi, founder of Sangama, has seen this silence harden over decades. “We’ve documented so many cases where trans persons were sexually abused by cis men,” he says. “But the police laugh… The fear of being ridiculed is greater than the fear of not getting justice. At least silence doesn’t make you a spectacle.”

And for people like Adil, that exclusion isn’t just structural — it’s personal. “I stopped waiting for justice, I just want the world to accept what happened, even if it is too late to care,” he says. “Everyone tells you to move on, but how do you move on from something the world says never happened?”