This article is the first in a three-part series. The Bombay high court‘s judgment in the Tarun Tejpal case is more than another major decision on rape law. It reflects the tensions of a society that has undergone rapid social, economic and cultural transformation over the past two decades, compelling courts to interpret constitutional principles within multiple and often conflicting social realities.This series does not seek to revisit the facts of the case or opine upon the correctness of the judgment. Instead, it uses the judgment as a point of departure to examine larger constitutional questions that have received little attention in public discourse.§Long before constitutions articulated rights or criminal statutes defined consent, societies evolved norms governing attraction, courtship, sexuality, power and restraint. Whether these norms were just or oppressive is a separate question. They nevertheless provided a common vocabulary through which women and men interpreted each other’s behaviour.The law intervened only when these social institutions failed.The Bombay high court’s judgment in the Tarun Tejpal appeal represents one such occasion for us to reflect on the gulf between law and society. Much of the public conversation has focused upon one compelling observation made by the court that the “perfect victim” is a myth. That phrase will undoubtedly become the judgment’s most quoted passage.Yet its real significance lies elsewhere. The judgment is not merely a repudiation of one stereotype about women. It signals India’s entry into an international constitutional movement that has quietly transformed the law of sexual offences over the past three decades.The transformation has occurred not primarily through legislative revolution but through a more subtle process. Courts across constitutional democracies have gradually changed the questions they ask. For nearly two centuries, judges frequently asked whether a complainant behaved as a genuine victim ought to behave. Modern constitutional jurisprudence asks a fundamentally different question. Did she consent? That shift may appear deceptively simple. In reality, it represents one of the most profound changes in modern criminal jurisprudence.The invisible anthropology of rape lawEvery legal system rests upon certain assumptions about human behaviour. Often these assumptions remain unstated because they appear self-evident to the generation that created them. Nineteenth-century rape jurisprudence was built upon one such invisible anthropology. A “truthful” woman was expected to resist physically. She would immediately complain to the nearest authority. She would sever all contact with the accused. She would exhibit visible emotional devastation.Any delay in reporting, continued communication with the accused, apparent composure or inconsistency in narration invited judicial suspicion. This expectation was rarely expressed as a formal rule of law. It nevertheless permeated legal reasoning across common-law jurisdictions. Judges routinely treated post-assault behaviour as a measure of credibility rather than recognising that human beings respond to trauma in profoundly different ways.Also read: Lessons in Male Rage from a 13-Year Trial and BeyondThe irony was striking. The law claimed to assess evidence objectively while relying upon deeply subjective assumptions regarding how “real” victims ought to think, remember and behave. The result was a legal framework in which stereotypes quietly masqueraded as ‘evidence’.It is this intellectual inheritance that the Bombay high court explicitly rejects. The court observes that survivors process trauma differently and that courts possess no scientific basis to prescribe a uniform behavioural pattern after sexual assault. Behaviour before or after the incident cannot, by itself, determine credibility.From morality to autonomyFor centuries, sexual offences were understood through the language of morality. Respectability. Chastity. Honour. Character. Marriage. Female virtue. The complainant’s social identity often became inseparable from the legal evaluation of her complaint. Gradually, constitutional democracies abandoned this framework in favour of the principle of autonomy. The question was no longer whether a woman behaved like a ‘respectable’ woman. The question became whether she voluntarily agreed to participate in the specific sexual act.This was not merely a legal adjustment. It represented a philosophical transformation. The law ceased to protect an abstract social morality and instead protected the individual’s bodily autonomy. The first decisive articulation of this transformation came from Canada.The Canadian Supreme Court’s decision in R. v. Ewanchuk (1999) occupies a place in consent jurisprudence comparable to Brown v. Board of Education in equality law or Donoghue v. Stevenson in negligence. Its significance lies not in the facts alone but in the principle it established. The court rejected the notion of implied consent. Consent, it held, is not something inferred from silence, passivity or ambiguity. It must be affirmatively communicated by the complainant. Equally significant was the court’s rejection of the defence of “implied consent” based upon assumptions regarding female behaviour.The decision dismantled centuries of judicial speculation about what women “must have meant”. Instead, it insisted that the law concerns itself with what the complainant actually communicated. This represented a constitutional commitment to autonomy over assumption.England carried this evolution further. The Sexual Offences Act, 2003, defined consent as agreement by choice, with the freedom and capacity to make that choice, while requiring that an accused’s belief in consent be objectively reasonable. The inquiry no longer centred solely on the complainant’s conduct but also on whether the accused had taken reasonable steps to ascertain consent.Also read: When it Comes to Rape By Men in Uniform, the Media Forgets the Victim is Also Part of the ‘Nation’Australian courts added another important dimension by incorporating insights from behavioural science. Trauma-informed adjudication recognised that delayed reporting, fragmented memory, continued interaction with the accused or emotional composure are not reliable indicators of fabrication. Equally, psychology was never permitted to replace evidence; it merely cautioned courts against relying upon intuition unsupported by science.Scandinavian reforms, particularly Sweden’s affirmative consent legislation and Spain’s subsequent “Only Yes Means Yes” law, completed the transition by emphasising voluntary participation rather than the absence of resistance. Across jurisdictions, rape law has steadily moved from protecting social morality to safeguarding individual autonomy.Indian jurisprudence did not remain insulated from these developments. The Justice Verma Committee, constituted after the horrific events of December 2012, represented perhaps the most comprehensive reconsideration of Indian sexual offence law since Independence. The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013, introduced substantial changes to the definition of rape, strengthened protections surrounding consent and amended the law of evidence to reduce reliance upon a complainant’s sexual history or perceived moral character. The constitutional vocabulary had changed.Dignity, autonomy, equality, consent. These ideas are increasingly shaped by judicial reasoning. The Bombay high court’s judgment must therefore be situated within this constitutional evolution. Its rejection of the “perfect victim” is not an isolated judicial flourish. It reflects a broader international movement away from judging complainants through inherited assumptions regarding female behaviour.If nineteenth-century courts distrusted women because they failed to resemble the “perfect victim”, behavioural science explains why trauma manifests differently across individuals. It explains why some survivors delay disclosure. Why others remain in contact with perpetrators. Why memory may become fragmented. Why outward composure often conceals profound psychological injury.The Bombay high court’s judgment marks an important stage in India’s constitutional engagement with modern consent jurisprudence. But it also raises a larger question that extends far beyond one prosecution. Can legal principles developed within other constitutional democracies be transplanted onto a society whose social evolution may not have kept pace with modern notions of body autonomy?That question, surprisingly, has received little attention.It is to that uniquely Indian constitutional challenge that we must now turn.Sandhya Gokhale is a lawyer, writer and film maker. Author’s declaration: I used AI as a research aid while developing this series, particularly for comparative jurisprudence and checking relevant legal sources. The arguments, analysis and conclusions are my own.