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Violence, power and patriarchy

Violence against women is the most-compelling social problem in India.

Violence, power and patriarchy

Arming themselves: School girls learn martial arts from the DCP, Special Police Unit for Women and children in New Delhi. PTI



Rajeshwari

Violence against women is the most-compelling social problem in India. The Thomson Reuters Foundation has listed India as the fourth-most dangerous country for women in terms of sexual violence, trafficking, health and economic resources.  The year book of  NCRB reveals that women are subjected to various kinds of violence. An incident of cruelty by a husband is reported every five minutes, a woman is raped every 21 minutes and a young married woman is burnt or driven to suicide due to dowry every 64 minutes (NCRB, 2015). Analysis of the growing cases of violence against women reveals how gender-based violence cuts across divisions of class, religion, age, ethnicity, cultural and geography. Attempts to explain "why women are assaulted" have also received greater attention but there is no decline in crime against women.  The only positive part of this increased attention may be that it symbolically transformed women from invisible appendages of males to separate individuals.

Women are victims of various kinds of ill-treatment, humiliation, torture and exploitation which starts even before birth and remains till the end of life. A girl embryo becomes victim of sex-selective abortion, during stages of infancy discrimination towards access to food and medical care is common.  During adolescence, young girls often face harrasment,  wolf whistling, winking and passing of loud remarks, stalking,  trafficking, genital mutilation, child marriage and sexual abuse by family members and strangers.  In their reproductive age, this process continues and women are subjected to honour killings, acid throwing, rape, intimate partner violence and dowry-related violence. A consensus definition of violence against women is: “Any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life". 

However, the focus is usually only on physical abuse or sexual assault.  Psychological, verbal, spiritual, and economic abuse are absent for several reasons. Unless women clearly label hurtful behavior as “criminal” in their minds, they tend not to report it. Many women who experience what the law defines as “crime against women” do not label their assault as such or even as a form of victimisation due to strong social forces. The National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) is the source of crime data for all states in India. Crimes are reported as cognisable and non-cognisable. Non-cognisable are those offences where a police officer has no authority to take action or arrest without warrant.  All crimes are listed under two categories — Indian Panel Code (IPC) and Special and Local Laws (SLL). The crimes under the IPC are reported under 32 crime heads. These may be broadly categorised into nine major categories: (i) Crimes against body: murder, culpable homicide, kidnapping and abduction, grievous hurt, causing death by negligence, causing injuries under rash driving. In India, one-third of total crimes are reported under this head.  (ii) Sexual offences comprise rape, attempt to rape, assault on women with intent to outrage her modesty, insult to the modesty of women, cruelty by husband; and this constitute about 9 per cent of total IPC crimes. 

Other crimes include crimes against property and against public order; economic crimes and human trafficking. In totality, the crimes against women comprise nine types of offences which are listed under both IPC and SLL categories. 

Haryana has a dubious record in incidence of crime against women. It is not that the sex ratio in the state is low, (it ranks at 34th position), but ranks fourth in India as far as crime against women is concerned.    Who could forget the sufferings of the four-year-old girl of Sirsa village who was burnt with hot tongs by her grandmother, for being born  as a girl? One may hear “molki stories” (women purchased for marriage and their distress) in village after village in “progressive” Haryana. 

Another survey reports that 32 per cent women in the state are victims of spousal violence. The NCRB  data also shows that in Haryana, reported crime against women is 73 per lakh women, against 55 for the all -India average (NCRB, 2016).  It may, however, be noted that this is only the tip of the iceberg as majority of offences against women go unreported. Even in these, cruelty by the husband accounts for 45 per cent of total offences, followed by  abduction and kidnapping and rape accounting for 25 per cent each. 

There is no single theory which can fully explain violence against women. The social learning theory is most often used to explain women abuse. It shares one common argument, that is violence and aggression are not inherent properties of the individual; rather they are learned behaviours.  It maintains that male children are more likely to grow up to assault females if they have observed their fathers assaulting their spouses. This has some empirical support and is accepted across the political spectrum. There are others who maintain that men abuse women to maintain power and control over them.  Power and patriarchy are the key explanatory factors. In case of Haryana, it is the mix of these two which may explain the total spectrum of violence against women.

The causes of and solutions to the problem of violence against women are structural, but one cannot lose sight of individuals. The challenge we confront is to disentangle the complex relationship between individuals and society, including our own role in this dialectics. This is a tall order, but perhaps  the only way to combat this social evil.

 The writer is Chairperson, Department of Geography, Kurukshetra University.

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