International Law

Criminal Legal Systems Failing Women

Professor Preeti Pratishruti Dash joins BU Law as the 2024–25 William and Patricia Kleh Distinguished Visiting Professor of International Law.

Preeti Pratishruti Dash grew up in the eastern side of India, in Bhubaneshwar. While Indian culture and laws hold strong patriarchal values, she witnessed her parents buck the norms from a young age. Her mother struggled after marriage to adjust to an orthodox, patriarchal household, and so, together, they chose instead to live with her mother’s parents.

“Usually, in the Indian context, anything like that could lead to the breakup of a marriage,” Pratishruti Dash shares. “And there are Indian courts which have said that forcing the daughter-in-law to serve hot tea to the mother-in-law in the morning, does not constitute marital cruelty.”

“That unusual matrilocal upbringing, which is extremely exceptional in the Indian setting, initiated my critique of prevalent gender relationships. To see my parents stick with each other despite the social stigma around it, that was very reassuring. I learned we don’t have to always adhere to societal norms about what we are supposed to do.”

When Pratishruti Dash began studying the law, she was provided with a new vocabulary around gender relations. “Once you start seeing things through the lens of gender or class, then it becomes completely impossible to unsee it or to overlook it,” she notes.

As the Kleh Visiting International Professor of Law at BU Law this semester, Pratishruti Dash is teaching a seminar titled “Challenging Carcerality: Criminalization of Violence Against Women.” She is examining imprisonment globally, focusing on how United States policies are transported to other countries in the global south.

“Those criminal legal systems are not equipped to deal with a wide range of social issues, and enforcing the criminal provisions produces significant unintended consequences,” Pratishruti Dash explains, “such as when victims don’t belong to the ‘ideal’ victim category or are from socioeconomically marginalized groups where there are already additional hurdles accessing the legal system. Then, when something is criminalized, it creates even further hurdles, and you are seen as a suspect, as an ‘imperfect’ victim, who is subjected to disbelief.”

Therefore, she reinforces the importance for American law students to learn about the harms that criminal legal systems produce across the world. “My hope is that by exposing my students to these different jurisdictions and how they deal with the American experience of criminalization, it would make them a little more critical of their own legal system or its uncritical export to other parts of the world, holding the state accountable a little more than it currently is. And the current position is almost next to nothing.”

The American criminal system has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Pratishruti Dash stresses the importance of understanding why the US is unique. She points out that people who speak for victims, like Black feminists, may have seen the detriment of criminal legal enforcement. “Victim groups from the most marginalized sections of the society,” Pratishruti Dash explains, “are so anti-carceral because they probably have been seeing for generations that it’s not a system which is helping them.”

Shortly after earning her undergraduate degree, Pratishruti Dash moved to Delhi to work with an NGO called Partners for Law in Development to help enforce new criminal laws protecting women, which were created following the 2012 case where four Indian men were convicted of the gang rape and murder of a student in Delhi and given the death sentence. However, Pratishruti Dash found that income inequality was more central to their lives than the need for the services the organization was providing.

She shifted to work as a research associate with Project 39A, a pro bono litigation and research clinic at National Law University, Delhi, which focuses on reforming India’s criminal justice system. Pratishruti Dash researched the systemic problems that drove over 75% of those on death row to be of lower castes, including religious minorities. Despite their right to a lawyer, once at the trial, many of these defendants’ lawyers failed to appear or were incapable.

Following her work with Project 39A, Professor Pratishruti Dash saw the need for a deeper dive academically and pursued her LLM at Harvard Law School. “As I was working on the death penalty,” she shares, “I realized that parts of the criminal legal system are not functioning in the ways that they aspire to. As a result, it’s not only harmful for people who are incarcerated but also for victims, because once you have solutions in place under criminal law, then the state can wash its hands of the victim.”

While at Harvard, Pratishruti Dash credits a course with feminist legal theorist Professor Janet Halley that exposed her to the various debates within feminism. “What is overlooked is that women are not a homogeneous group, and different groups of women experience different kinds of harm,” she shares.

Pratishruti Dash taught criminal law and criminal procedure in India at the National Law School of India University in Bangalore after earning her LLM. She often brings her experiences from capital defense litigation into the classroom, engaging with students by sharing examples of how often criminal law procedures are disregarded.

While the topics she teaches may be challenging to address, Pratishruti Dash doesn’t actively discourage students from sharing personal experiences. “So many of these opinions are also shaped by who we are–like what race I belong to, or what my experience with the police has been when I was younger, or my community’s experience has been, or someone has worked at a family violence unit,” she says. “That sometimes adds to the richness of the class.” Professor Pratishruti Dash sees her role as connecting the discussion back to the assigned theoretical material.

Pratishruti Dash is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Cambridge, where she is a Gates-Cambridge Scholar. As part of her research, she has discovered a global phenomenon of feminism that she had first observed in India, which is “a reliance on a protectionist understanding of women. Familial ideology, or the need to protect the victim, did not understand these women as individual citizens who have claims over the state. For instance, the Delhi gang rape case later came to be called India’s daughter, or ‘Nirbhaya- the fearless one.’”

Her doctoral work focuses on the downsides of punitive approaches to sexual violence in India, which Pratishruti Dash recognizes may be challenging for some to digest or seen as a step backwards for the status of women. However, she notes, “Criminal law can’t be the only point of contact between the state and women. My work looks beyond that, coming from a pro-victim perspective. Victims of rape, victims of domestic violence suffer trauma, and there is so much social stigma around sex, around rape that it is difficult for them to find their place in the system.”