On Monday, Delhi Police arrested a 19-year-old woman after another woman accused her of holding her hostage and sexually assaulting her, along with two men. This is the first ever rape charge brought against a woman by a woman in India, and the response has shown that our legal system is truly ill-equipped to deal with cases of same-sex sexual assault.

The survivor, a migrant to the city from eastern India, has described the multiple assaults which happened over two months. She was held hostage in an apartment in Dilshad Colony, where she was gang raped in the woman's presence. Recounting her ordeal to a national portal, the victim said that the two men pinned her down on all fours on the bed while the accused woman "raped" her using a sex toy to "make her ready for anal sex".

When she first approached the police in October 2018, they refused to file a case stating that a woman could not commit the crime of rape according to IPC provision Section 376 that lists down punishment for rape but restricts its definition to a man-woman act.

A legal expert told a leading daily that the case has become complicated, thanks to the reading down of Section 377. Same-sex intercourse is no longer an offence but is still applicable in cases of "no consent penile unnatural sex which also involves minors".

The legal conundrum aside, this case forces us to expand our view and definition of sexual assault. Like everything else in our universe, our understanding of the scope of sexual assault too is limited by heteronormativity. Just like we view same-sex relations as ‘not normal', an instance of a woman sexually assaulting another goes against everything we are taught about both women and sex.

Till recently, popular opinion maintained that women were weak, passive beings not capable of violence. Women were not supposed to enjoy sex, let alone force it. But the truth is that the all-pervasive misogyny of our world teaches young women the same lessons that it teaches young men.

Women too are conditioned to reduce and objectify other women and the lessons of rape culture (women are ‘frigid' if they do not actively perform femininity and ‘asking for it' if they do) are imbibed by them too. The accused woman joined the two men to assault another woman and dehumanised her just like the two men did.

Because we still view women through the lens of patriarchy, a woman committing rape shocks us--and that makes it all the more easier to dismiss the claims of the survivor. A woman raping another woman is unthinkable. This is not how women behave, society tells us. Our legal system is not equipped to handle woman-to-woman sexual assault. Thus the survivors of such violence become the most isolated of crime victims.

The conversation surrounding sexual assault needs to expand to cover the LGBTQ communities too, because rape happens in queer spaces and relationships too. We need to condemn the crime without letting the gender and the sexuality of the criminal becoming the larger issue.