RIGHTS-INDIA: Social Approval for Family Violence Against Women

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Nov 27 2000 (IPS) - Not too many Indians were surprised when a survey commissioned by the government, found that three out of every five women in the country believe that there are times when a man can rightly beat up his wife.

“It shows that the rights guaranteed to women under the Indian Constitution are there only on paper,” said Jyotsna Chatterjee, director of the Joint Women’s Programme, a leading women’s rights group based in the Indian capital city.

The survey, included in the government’s National Family Health Survey released mid-November, and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), quizzed some 90,000 married women between 15 and 49 years of age.

It found that three out of five women believe that a man can beat his wife is she neglects the family or children, and specially if she is unfaithful or shows disrespect to her in-laws.

It also found that better educated women were less likely to justify such violence.

Raising the level of women’s literacy in a country where less than 40 percent of women can read and write, is believed by many to be crucial for changing social attitudes that encourage violence against them.

However, even as India marked ‘World Day for the Eradication of Violence Against Women’ on Nov. 25 with calls to change attitudes that encourage this, there was disturbing evidence that the causes are more complex.

Education and literacy, according to other surveys, may not deter physical assaults on women within the household.

In southern coastal Kerala state, which became India’s first to become fully literate nearly a decade ago, 30 percent of women complain of physical abuse and another 69 percent have faced psychological harassment.

Women in affluent households in the Indian capital too are not immune to such violence. Meenakshi Ahuja, a gynaecologist, who runs a clinic for rich patients, says she has often treated women from “respectable” upper middle-class families for mysterious injuries, with victims unwilling to tell how these were inflicted.

According to Anuradha Rajan, India representative of the International Centre for Research on Women (ICRW), in India, “a wife is considered an outsider in her husband’s home and a routine beating is one way of securing her subordination.”

A report released by the ICRW earlier this year showed that 50 percent of women surveyed in the Indian capital and five other big cities in north, central and south India, had suffered physical violence from their husbands.

Rajan thinks that a key reason for this is that Indian society has traditionally treated violence against women as a matter well within the private family domain.

Rights groups see glimmerings of hope in a new legislation to fight domestic violence against women. The draft law, which is to be approved by Indian Parliament, will make it possible for victims to appeal to the law courts to warn abusive husbands and in-laws against future violence.

“A restraining order from the court can serve as a warning to an abusive husband or in-law to stop violence without actually landing the the husband in jail,” says leading Indian women’s rights activist and lawyer Indira Jaisingh.

Present laws provide for fines or imprisonment of a husband and in-laws for causing cruelty to a married woman. But this is limited to harassment related to dowry or for driving the woman to suicide.

Indian newspapers Sunday prominently reported the arrest of Satya Prakash Gulia an inspector in the Delhi police force, following the suicide of his wife Meena after she poisoned to death their two children.

Meena was alleged to have done this because she was unable to bear the constant harassment from her husband and in-laws for not bringing enough dowry at the time of her marriage.

Dowry deaths in India are growing by 8.3 percent every year, while incidents of torture and cruelty by husbands and in-laws are rising by 13.2 percent annually, says Jaisingh.

However, it is not going to be easy even to enact the new legislation against other forms of violence against women.

No less a person than the legal adviser to the Delhi police, O.S. Sharma, opposes the proposed law as this will go “against the spirit of the family system prevailing in this country.”

“The reasons for disharmony and violence arise only when either the wife is reluctant or refuses to adjust herself (or when there is) unnecessary interference by the parents of the wife,” says Sharma in a report which he has published.

Sharma claims that women could misuse the proposed law to “blackmail” their husbands and in-laws to an extent which would “prove suicidal to society.”