Durba Mitra's Research Cited in Pakistan Supreme Court Decision

March 29, 2021
Durba Mitra

WGS Professor Durba Mitra's collaborative research project with legal scholar Mrinal Satish, "Testing Chastity, Evidencing Rape" (2014), on the negative impact of prejudicial forensic medical evidence on rape adjudication in India from the 1950s until 2010s, has been cited in a new landmark decision by the Pakistan Supreme Court. In response to years of advocacy by feminist activists and lawyers in Pakistan, the Supreme Court ruled prejudicial forensic evidence and women's past sexual history are irrelevant and unconstitutional in the adjudication of rape cases, asserting women's enshrined right to dignity under the law. The Pakistan SC judgment can be found here.

Mitra is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, the Carol K. Pforzheimer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and the author of Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton University Press, 2020). Her current book project explores the history of Third World feminist theory and South-South solidarity movements.

 

 

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