Myth: "The Domestic Violence Act Means a Wife Can Never Be Arrested for Hitting Her Husband"

The claim

A version of this argument shows up whenever OIM’s own PWDVA entry gets shared: “if the Domestic Violence Act only protects women, that means a wife can physically assault her husband and face no consequences.” It’s presented as a logical extension of the statute’s sex-specific design.

Why the underlying premise is correct, but the conclusion doesn’t follow

It’s true, and OIM’s own Law Library says so: the PWDVA is built around women as the statutory “aggrieved person,” and there’s no equivalent central domestic-violence statute constructing the same protection-order machinery for a male victim. That part of the claim is accurate.

What the claim leaves out

The PWDVA is a civil statute. It creates protection orders, residence orders and monetary relief — it does not define a criminal offence of “domestic violence” that only applies to husbands. General criminal law sits entirely outside PWDVA and applies regardless of the complainant’s or the accused’s sex: provisions covering hurt, assault, criminal force and criminal intimidation in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita don’t name a gender for either party. A wife who physically assaults a husband can be charged under those general provisions exactly as a husband could be for the same conduct against a wife. PWDVA’s existence, or its absence for male victims, doesn’t touch this at all.

The verdict, precisely

False. The sex-specific design of PWDVA is real; the claim that it creates a criminal-law exemption for wives does not follow from that fact and isn’t true.

What this does not mean

It does not mean the two situations are practically symmetrical in every respect — reporting rates, police response, and social context can all differ in ways this piece isn’t measuring. It means the specific logical step in this claim — “no PWDVA-style statute for men implies no consequences for a wife’s violence” — is a non sequitur. Absence of a mirror special statute is not the same as absence of all remedy, which is exactly the distinction OIM’s Law Library entries are built to keep visible.