THE JANUARY 2026 issue of the ‘Staying Alive’ series – a year long special series commemorating twenty years of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 (‘PWDVA’) – takes us through the insights of Anjali Dave, whose experience working survivors of violence in the criminal justice system laid the seeds of the idea of a ‘Protection Officer’. Dave was a pioneer of the TISS Special Cell, and her veteran experience in counseling and casework shaped not only the drafting of the law, but also its interpretation when it came to truly engaging and understanding the needs of India’s domestic violence survivors.
Asmita Basu: Anjali, could you start by telling us a little bit about how you came into the work of drafting the law and where it all started.
Anjali Dave: The essential space came from the Special Cell’s work, and talking about it, working with women, discovering ways to,“help women in their journey of fight against domestic violence.”
The Special Cell engaged with survivors, not with women who had given up. Here were women who were ready to fight back against violence, in whatever form that they understood. The typical understanding of how women who have been violated are – sad, broken – was shattered when we first met these survivors, when we started working forty years ago.
Our premise, when we started the Special Cell, was to be the first point of contact in the criminal justice system. At that time, as part of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, we undertook field-based initiatives, and met extensively with women’s organisations. We also worked with many women who worked on this subject in Mumbai and we used to send our cases to Indira, who was one of them. When Indira first heard about our work, she visited us at the Special Cell one day out of the blue. This is how our momentum picked up
Bit by bit, the conversation became about Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code – what it was doing, the arguments surrounding it, and how our criminal courts are unable to do anything. We understood that eighty percent of survivors simply wanted the violence to stop and wanted to go back to their homes, meaning that they did not want to file a case under 498A. But the question remained – how do we work with that?
In the 1980s, Indira wrote in a book that we need something akin to a Domestic Violence Act. It literally took us 25 years to manifest this proposal into reality.
The Special Cell started working in 1984. In 1997, the International Centre for Research on Women (‘ICRW’), a global research organisation, convinced us to undertake a particular research. The first part of this research was to look at the data we had collected at the Special Cell. The other part of this research was to look at women who had registered cases under Section 498A.
Our premise, when we started the Special Cell, was to be the first point of contact in the criminal justice system.
Asmita Basu: Was the Special Cell already in existence when you started?
Anjali Dave: I was one of the first social workers. Others like Mrinal Gore and socialist groups also wanted to work on issues like dowry deaths, lack of response from police and such.
In 1997, when we started researching 498A, we wanted to hear the voice of the women. What are the women saying about 498A? Why is their voice not reaching the police? Why are the cases falling apart – falling through police records?
We started combing through cases regarding women who had faced violence and survived in order to understand how the entire process had panned out in the police stations.
And we also wanted to document the kind of statements that women were making which were going to court, and also what was happening in court. In that sense, there was qualitative data, and there were about fifteen cases which we took from a police station. Fortunately, we got permission to look at the police records since we approached them as researchers. However, we did not get access to court records - so our research was hinged on the police records, which obviously were in Marathi.
Indira was also involved with us at the time, and that is when the conversation on the Domestic Violence Act – what should be done, and how – started. Around 1999, we also started the work of institutionalising the special cells – it couldn’t just remain the TISS Special Cell since we were already working with three police stations in Bombay at that time – at the head office, at the Dadar Police Station in the middle of the city (after the police commissioner told us that we should work in a non-elite area and see what the city is like), and later at a western suburb.
We saw that social intervention was working. Soon we were talking with UNIFEM and Ford Foundation as well. At that time, Mallika Dutt, who was with the Ford Foundation, was also working on police reforms and she saw the work of the special cells as part of a police reforms project. We knew that we could not take international funding since our goal was to push the government to institutionalise the Special Cells and the government would not take international funds. So Mallika and Ford Foundation basically gave the funds to UNIFEM, which was a UN entity, which could then transfer the funds to the government. Meanwhile, we were also working on police training.
Around 2000, Indira and I went to the US to present our findings, and understand how domestic violent related systems worked in the US. After completing the presentations in Washington, we met several activists, justice organisations and police officials in New York. This is how we began not only working on the law, but thinking about what could be there in the law.
The Special Cell was an important learning point for us to understand that intervention could work. It was the first multi-agency coordinated response in the country to domestic violence.
The feminist social practice that we were already working with grew and developed into what became the Special Cell. From the beginning, and till today, however, we still say that this is ‘pro-women’ work, because the moment you use the term ‘feminist’, there is immediate suspicion.
Asmita Basu: I wanted to ask you – what is feminist practice really? We use words like ‘intersectional’, ‘multi-agency’, ‘accompaniment’ and such, but what was it in practice?
Anjali Dave: One day, Sharmila Joshi, who was a senior journalist, came for an interview, and she asked me if I was a feminist. This was 1984. I just told her, ‘Listen, I don’t know enough about feminism, so let me not say that I am a feminist’.
When I use the word ‘feminist’, I think, do people around us understand what it is that we are working for? The essential part is that it is our fight to say we are human beings, and we will need to be treated with dignity. That is what my liberal understanding has been, and more and more schools of thoughts have added a lens to sharpen our understanding further.
Beyond the differences that civil society has in terms of our economic philosophies, politics and understanding of impact, it is essentially about human living and the pursuit for everyone to be treated with respect and dignity, which is why I did not want to be boxed into public imagination as a feminist solely.
The Special Cell was an important learning point for us to understand that intervention could work.
Asmita Basu: What do you think about the role of counseling?
Anjali Dave: You tend to use the word counselling, and I tend to use the word social work intervention. We weren’t just telling women to do the right thing, to behave, to change their behavior, their expectations, get everybody to join them and respect them. We were also listening to what the women wanted, how they wanted. Some women wanted marriage, some did not, some wanted relationships, some wanted divorce, some wanted to have multiple partners. It didn’t matter what they wanted.
We were also working with police – doing training, conducting research and looking at various systems that were allowing women to be part of justice delivery spaces. Thus, social work intervention is not only at the individual level, but works at multiple levels - with groups, with large communities, with systems. For me, if we continue to see the work of the Special Cell as counselling alone, I think that would be reductionist. We were constantly doing collaborative work, engaged in negotiations. Counselling is just one of the things that we do.
Asmita Basu: Keeping in mind this broad understanding of social work, how was the idea of ‘Protection Officer’ (‘PO’) envisaged?
Anjali Dave: If you can recall, we didn’t start with the idea of a PO, but came across it in the middle when the idea of a PO came up during one of our meetings or presentations. We had already discussed the idea of a service provider – so a PO was to be similarly officially recognised in spaces, would have similar ideological positions, similar training and qualifications. The work could be of an overwhelming nature and thus training was essential to understand how to navigate the space.
Even though I had the reputation of being an activist, I had certain qualifications because of which I could navigate the space.
In a system, you cannot impose on anyone that there is a particular way we need you to think. We’ve all learned that is not going to work.
The court, the law, and the judiciary have been unable to absorb, integrate POs into their system.
Asmita Basu: To what extent do you think this broad idea of social work practice got reflected in the Protection Officer's role and institutionalised by the law?
Anjali Dave: Unfortunately, not enough. Today, qualifications of the POs are left entirely upon the state government to decide. Since qualifications have been deprioritised, today several lawyers are engaged as POs, and they only perceive situations through a legal lens. They are not trained to talk to people beyond the legal space. So the whole issue of what should be the qualifications of POs has suffered.
For instance, in Maharashtra, there are legal officers, who tell you about the law, and Protection Officers, who can be anybody. These POs are recruited through the Maharashtra Public Service Commission – hence the recruited individuals are also of a certain way since they have come through a political process.
The other big challenge is the bridge to courts. In many cases, magistrates didn't even know there was an outreach officer for their court.
The court, the law, and the judiciary have been unable to absorb, integrate POs into their system. We've had service providers from day one. Hardly any data shows courts calling service providers, even when they've referred cases to them.
So a big bridge that has continued to exist is this dependence on the law. We've not been able to nurture a strong social infrastructure. The Service Provider and the PO were part of this social infrastructure that we created for the PWDVA, but they have not been harnessed into the kind of work you need to do on domestic violence issues.
Asmita Basu: I think the Protection Officer concept was built on the Commissioner of Court model, where commissioners do investigations. The Protection Officer's role was divided into before, during and after litigation. Given that there hasn't been an uptake, was it because you were trying to integrate the discipline of social work into the system? What worked in the Special Cells that didn't work for the Act?
Anjali Dave: First and foremost, qualifications. I'm not saying social work is the cure of all ills. What I'm saying is, having people from a sound mix of backgrounds from sociology, psychology, any of the humanities qualifications which teach you to deal with social realities, that hasn't happened.
Second is ongoing training and supervision. We put the POs under the Women and Child Department (WCD), not the law department. So there's departmental rivalry and bureaucratic processes. We didn't spend enough time thinking through what it would mean for those people to navigate that environment. The WCD officer they report to is not by law, it's an administrative position, while the protection officer is a legal position. There's that tension.
In Maharashtra atleast, the POs are appointed under the law. Unless the law changes, they're there. They're responsible to an administrative officer but supposed to be working with the law and the court. This alignment has yet to happen.
There may be five or seven POs in an office, but they have not come together to advocate with the judiciary to say our presence, our importance matters. Nobody's fighting for it as a collective force.
One of the most significant things we achieved with the PWDVA was to recognize the work of women's organizations in the larger legal system.
Asmita Basu: Multi-agency coordination hasn't happened.
Anjali Dave: It hasn't happened because there's nobody to lead it. You need coordinators, supervisors, somebody to argue your cases.
TISS did a research where they sat through magistrate courts for months observing domestic violence cases, and how the judiciary responded. It was not a very encouraging situation. We did extensive research on Section 498A cases in four districts in Rajasthan. We found that there's no communication between the magistrate’s court, family court and the dowry court. Nobody talks to anybody and the woman is dropped in an enormous ocean of pain. Cases could have gone back to the family court, been referred to a PWDVA court or to an NGO. However, the magistrate just says that there's no case and drops it. This integration hasn't happened.
Perhaps our emphasis was only on establishing it by law, assuming it would work automatically. Even though we created this infrastructure, it was too limited in the larger scheme of things. In Mumbai, they haven't been able to establish these connections. Women's organization workers, social workers know the POs, they build bridges with the POs, but the POs building bridges with the judiciary is where the gap remains.
Lastly, I see the PO's role in social services as being part of care and justice. By fulfilling that role, I'm already working towards what is part of that justice. Building – rebuilding more than anything else, helping them rebuild. This is the reason why POs become so important.
Asmita Basu: Had you been drafting the law today, or if you could amend it, which parts would you look at?
Anjali Dave: One of the most significant things we achieved with the PWDVA was to recognize the work of women's organizations in the larger legal system. The definition gave a broad scope, allowing many forms of violence to be included. Though it became a lengthy provision, we were able to accomplish that. Apart from what I've said, we need to spend much more time and energy on the ground, not only on amending the law.
When the law first came out, people were saying, "abhi toh nahi bol sakte, PWDVA aa gaya hai, abhi toh shaadi aisa hi karna padega." All that has diminished. The impact on public consciousness hasn't materialized.
All the timelines we established, 60 days, 200 days, none of it is being adhered to. All the safeguards or mechanisms created, haven't been meaningful in this larger labyrinth of the justice system. I still feel we have too much dependence on the law, and on the magistrate’s court. We haven't been able to get them to share the power of the law with us.
There are questions about whether PWDVA should have some criminal provisions rather than just civil ones, because ultimately the woman still needs to fight so many other battles. When the situation here itself is so challenging, when will she be able to move to the next stage?
The work required for domestic violence is being recognized in law, not on the ground as I would want. I haven't directly dealt with it for years, but I had students placed with the PO's office documenting all they observed. POs are hardly known. I don't know how many cases go directly to POs. Women approach mostly through NGOs, lawyers.
Asmita Basu: Or the court directs them to the PO.
Anjali Dave: Percentage-wise, very few cases. You might look at the gender composition of POs. Do we have POs in all states, or are there still many with additional responsibilities? From my own reflection, the latest research on Bihar and Maharashtra special cells shows the percentage of POs referring cases to special cells, or courts referring cases for counseling, is negligible. They're not utilizing that resource. How do we harness this infrastructure effectively?
Training is also inadequate. Ongoing training remains very generic!
Asmita Basu: Feminist training in general.