Access vs. Equity: Rethinking Women’s Pathways to Justice

Despite decades of progressive legal reforms, women’s access to justice remains constrained by complex structural barriers and societal norms. This research advocates that empowerment requires more than the mere “access” to laws or the existence of institutions. From key legislations like POCSO, the Domestic Violence Act, and constitutional guarantees provided under Articles 14, 15, and 21 to data from the National Crime Record Bureau and findings of civil society organisations, the paper first highlights the gap between legal promises and lived realities. Landmark judgments, international obligations like CEDAW, ICCPR, and studies by UN Women are another significant aspect of this paper to provide an in-depth analysis of the ground realities lived by countless women around the globe. Along with the doctrinal methodology, there is a mixture of empirical trends to reveal persistently low conviction rates in gender-based violence cases and sheer urban-rural disparities in justice delivery. The study focuses on four main categories of barriers that eventually hinders the pathways of women to justice, i.e., socio-cultural norms that discourage women to report crime immediately and burden women with the perception of society, shame, and guilt-tripping, economic dependence that limits their legal action and denies them autonomy of their own lives, procedural and institutional biases within law enforcement and judiciary where women often face sexual harassment or unusual delay in justice delivery, and inter-sectional disadvantages that severely affects women from marginalized communities. At the same time, to show where progress is taking root, this study critically evaluates the introduction of many recent opportunities to favour women, i.e., fast-track courts, one-stop crisis centres, women’s help desks, and growing engagements of civil society. By bridging doctrinal analysis with empirical data, this research aims to reveal where reform is truly needed and how it can move beyond symbolic access towards equitable justice for all women.