When a Family Member Becomes a Threat: Legal Options for Domestic Violence and Harassment at Home

Rohan Verma, a young man in his early twenties from Gomti Nagar, Lucknow, came to our office in late February 2025 in a state of visible distress. His elder brother Deepak, aged 29, had run away from the family home roughly three years prior. After an exhaustive search, the family eventually located Deepak in Nagpur, where he was working daily-wage shifts at a small roadside eatery. At the parents' repeated insistence, Deepak returned home. Their father, a businessman running a modest textile trading firm under the Alok Textiles banner in Gomti Nagar, gave Deepak a stake in the business and arranged his marriage to a young woman from a decent family.

Things fell apart fast. Deepak became physically abusive toward his wife, who was petite and in a vulnerable condition — she is now pregnant and the couple are on the verge of separation. He began blaming his parents for every failure in his life, from the collapsing marriage to what he called his "years of wasted potential." Fights with Rohan and their father turned physical. Their mother was beaten on more than one occasion and subjected to verbal abuse that Rohan described as deeply degrading. Deepak continued arriving at the family home unannounced, creating scenes, threatening, and resuming physical altercations.

Rohan's family had earlier approached a general civil lawyer, who filed a basic police complaint that went largely unactioned. When Rohan eventually reached our office, a structured approach combining a formal complaint under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita with an application for a Protection Order under the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 was put into motion. The police became responsive once the procedural groundwork was properly laid. The family began seeing meaningful relief within weeks, something the earlier approach had not managed to deliver.

You can read about this case in detail at https://sudhirrao.com/family-member-threat-domestic-violence-legal-options-india/