EARLIER THIS MONTH, the ‘Staying Alive: Third Monitoring and Evaluation Report 09’ on the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 (PWDVA) was released in Delhi. The report tracks the implementation of the Act for the third year in a row and has become a way to document jurisprudential development of the law and create a monitoring system. Findings are shared at a national conference annually at which civil society organisations can question state officials and examine progress. This has inadvertently come to operate as a social audit. The naming and shaming as well as applauding and deriding of state departments in a public forum fosters accountability and drives state governments to take necessary action. For example, this year, Minister for Law and Justice M. Veerappa Moily recognised the need for fast-track courts to deal with cases of violence against women, easy availability of free legal aid and prioritisation of women’s cases in courts.

This annual report is authored by Lawyers Collective – Women’s Rights Initiative (LWCRI) and the International Centre for Research on Women (ICRW) in collaboration with the National Commission for Women (NCW) and supported by the UN Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women. Three states were studied this year: Delhi, Maharashtra and Rajasthan. A survey conducted in Delhi and Rajasthan with police and protection officers (POs) assessed their knowledge of the law, the practices they followed and attitudes towards the PWDVA and women. Data was gathered from the judiciary and women who had used the law were contacted to understand their experiences and expectations.

Questions centered around some of the key provisions of the PWDVA such as: categories of women the law protects (i.e. the applicant), who can the woman file the case against (i.e. the respondent), what acts qualify as domestic violence, what is the objective of counseling under the PWDVA, and the right to residence. For attitudinal assessment, several questions and statements were posed to gauge their attitude and gender bias, such as “Domestic Violence is a family affair”; “Women before filing a complaint of domestic violence should consider how that would affect their children”; “Women deserve to be beaten in certain situations”.

This assessment police exposed possible barriers or facilitators in women’s access to the law. It also tried to evaluate if the law is serving its normative function by transforming societal norms and internalising the unacceptability of violence against women in the private sphere.

The PWDVA in many ways is a path-breaking law, not merely because it is an independent civil law that identifies violence against women in the shared household as ‘domestic violence’, but also because it provides women the right to reside in the shared household and protects women in non-matrimonial relationships. The right to reside in the shared household irrespective of any right, title or interest in the property safeguards women from dispossession. It also challenges the moral assumptions infused in other Indian laws by protecting women in non-marital relationships. The law provides protection, maintenance, residence, compensation and custody orders to the woman who has so far been relegated to the status of a ‘mistress’ with little or no rights, without passing judgment or denying her merely because she falls outside the ‘morally acceptable’ institution of marriage. The PWDVA also goes beyond marital relationships. It protects mothers, sisters, daughters, widows and women who are in relationships in the nature of marriage. The objective of recognising relationships in the nature of marriage was to offer protection to women whose ‘marriages’ are not valid in law or fail to meet the requirements of a legally valid marriage.

The study captured the knowledge and acceptability of some of these key provisions. For instance, a certain percentage of POs in Delhi and Rajasthan felt that women in live-in-relationships, bigamous and fraudulent marriages should not be provided protection under the Act. When their knowledge on what acts come under the definition of domestic violence was tested, they recognised most acts of physical, verbal, emotional and economic violence but there was ambiguity surrounding forced sex in marital relationships.

The report also examined how well participants understand the objective and spirit of the legislation by asking questions about the motive of counseling. The purpose of counseling under the Act is to build the confidence of the woman and counsel the man to stop violence, as opposed to the common, incorrect perception of ‘saving families’. It was found that some percentage of the police in Delhi and Rajasthan saw counseling as a way of striking a compromise between couples. This perception trivialises the severity of domestic violence and reestablishes the need for training and sensitisation of key contact agencies such as the POs and the police. The orders from Gujarat show that in many cases, parties have reached a ‘compromise’ or ‘settled the matter’. Whether this settling happened with the consent of the woman or because she was pressurised ‘to save the family’ is not known.

Similarly, the recognition of sexual abuse as domestic violence in relationships, especially in marriages, still needs to gain acceptance. Sex as a conjugal right of the man is a widely accepted patriarchal view. The study revealed that knowledge on the subject was low among participants and sexual abuse was alleged in few orders. The inclusion of sexual abuse in the Act which includes sex without consent is a breakthrough in Indian law. (Indian law did not recognise marital rape.)

This study will hopefully become an effective model to ensure implementation of the law and determine what areas need attention in sensitisation programs. Regular audit of the law and state functionaries influence states to adopt novel methods for better implementation and promote transparency and accountability through public forums.

Please refer to the report for a detailed discussion on the data gathered this year.

***

Sonal Makhija is a Bangalore-based lawyer and legal consultant. Her areas of interest are gender, human rights and anthropology of law.

The world premiere of Eve Ensler’s ‘I Am An Emotional Creature’ was some things expected and many not. It began regularly enough, with the usual spine-tingling statistics on female abuse, neglect and violations. Essayed as a relentless spiral of separate pieces without an intermission, the portrayals of women from around the world shifted from mediocre to spectacular as the play progressed. Moments of intense pain in “Free Barbie” were interspersed with a more defiant stance in “The Refusers” and stories of prostitution in Eastern Europe, military sex slaves in Ghana, bulimia in North America, child labor in China and forced cosmetic surgery in Iran tumbled out unapologetically, amidst joyous expressions of dance and womanhood. Woman cried, laughed, screamed, spoke, vented, explained, twirled and chanted their right to be emotional creatures and engage in the feminine act of dance as a form of expression.

Which left me wondering if this wasn’t stereotyping my gender just as much as any other descriptor. Are all women truly emotional creatures? More than men? Do we feel more intensely? Need to express more urgently? Or are we as much victim to this erroneous belief as to the acts perpetrated on us worldwide? Do all women desire to dance? Is feminine expression primarily manifested through physical acts? I, for one, certainly feel no need to plunge into a waltz each time I absolutely must say what I feel.  I am born of a mother who clicks her tongue at being “too emotional” and believes it clouds practicality and better judgement. My friends are women who rarely cry, even when they have much reason to. Are performance and feeling necessarily the domain of the XX? Could we not be harming ourselves by tarring all women across the world with the same brush and insinuating that a woman’s natural response to a situation is based on her feelings first and intellect later, if at all?

I could empathize with individual tales but not with the premise. And while I wish women power to overcome their tormentors, human and situational, I also hope that they strive to stand apart from the cluster of characteristics that haphazardly—and often thoughtlessly—define their gender.

~~~

To view a short clip about the play, go here.

UB: As a women’s rights and human rights activist, how do you look at the recent terror attacks and the various  responses to them?

MB: With a lot of apprehension. We are undoubtedly moving towards a harder police state and an openly intolerant and paranoid public polity moulded by a media that has blatantly cast aside its fig leaf of objectivity. The candle-lighting elite who wept and raged against the attack on their symbols of prosperity and their way of life have finally acquired their own cause with which to hit out at the totally delegitimised political class. And in their desire to have a more aggressive militarised state which can protect their way of life (the way the Washington clique in America sought to do after the original 9/11 attacks) it matters little if the basic human rights of all to peace, security and justice, are abrogated with impunity.

What the middle class and elite are also conveniently blind to is the fact that the corporate and political class are two faces of the same coin. Communal politics will get a new legitimacy in the name of the corporate war against terror since it feeds on racism, xenophobia, intolerance and bigotry at all levels. It is a war that will target not only Muslims and other minorities but also those who question its ethics and morality. Those who question the legitimacy of this war will be seen as undermining the power of the nation state and targeted as traitors, people who are not patriotic and nationalistic enough and therefore even potential terrorists or naxalites.

Nineteen-year-old Mukkaram who was shot and killed by in an army compound in Bangalore is perhaps the most recent example of collateral damage of the war on terror. The army and the police justify the killing saying the city is on “high alert”. They reportedly took the extreme step of shooting him instead of overpowering and catching him, not only because he was an intruder but more, because they heard him speak on his phone in Urdu! The tragedy is that he was apparently crying out for help on the phone to his family when he was trapped by the police.

Did Mohammed Mukarram Pasha, a college student and a playful teenager like most boys of that age, have to pay with his life for speaking in a language that like an entire community, has become suspect? What will this mean for youth like him in terms of choices if they have to counter at every stage the stigma of belonging to a community that is suspect irrespective of how common or ordinary their lives are?

What do human rights mean in times when, for the privileged few to have a right to their way of life, the dispensable majority will have to give up their right to be human! And how do we look to the state to protect the rights of those it does not even consider to be quite human?

The biggest challenge therefore before those who seek to speak out for women’s and human rights is to find a language, a political imagination and praxis outside this framework of state-centered rights to articulate and confront the long term impact of the violence of this war.

UB: There seem to be an upsurge in fundamentalisms all over the world. How do you think it affects women’s rights?

MB: The global war against terror, whose subtext is the clash of civilisations and the war of the rest against the west is undoubtedly going to fuel the increased fundamentalisation of all major global faiths. But we must not forget that this war is actually rooted in a very secular market fundamentalism and the global conflict over fast-depleting natural resources like oil and water. Because it is waged against the backdrop of religion and faith, this war will have a impact on the recasting of all identities be it that of caste, language or gender.

Women have always been the victims of and borne witness to the intolerance of identity politics. But the traditional stereotype of women being the carriers and repositories of their religions is going to be recast in these times when faiths are getting more homogenised to fit in with the needs of a globalised world. An increasingly talibanised wahabi Islam fueled by the petrodollar, an evangelical Christianity rearmed with all the symbols of western capitalism, the resurgent hate-filled politics of Hindutva attempting to go global on the back of the global Indian….

UB: How is all this going to affect women?

MB: Apart from the fact that women’s gender will continue to render them more vulnerable at the time of conflict as the mass rapes of Muslim women in the state-sponsored genocide by the Hindutva brigade in Gujarat prove, we are also seeing a more disturbing trend: the emergence of the new empowered woman flying the flag of her fundamentalised faith with militant vigor — much like women, after being coopted into the mainstream of development are flying high the flag of the dominant economy as its mindless consumers and exploitative entrepreneurs.

Who are these women? The new age corporate sati savitris popularised through TV soap operas who continue to fall at the feet of their husbands even as they morph themselves, when required, into a Sadhvi Pratigya willing to kill for the cause of the Hindu fatherland. Armed with a critique of the overexposed western woman, articulate Muslim women willingly walking into the invisible folds of the impenetrable veil, holding the holy book in one hand and an AK 47 on the other, seeking to bring faith back into a faithless world. Holster-swinging hockey moms like Sarah Palin rearming themselves with good, old fashioned Christian values who are not hesitating to fight for deregulation of fire arms in the US.

These women have rendered hollow the rhetoric of women’s rights. We need to redefine the term in today’s times of hyper-masculinised power and politics. Times when it is going to get increasingly difficult for disempowered women to negotiate more subversive spaces for dissent and transformation from within communities. The challenge for the women’s movement will be to recover and reassert this language of subversion as opposed to the language of cooption.

(To be cont…)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/_neF3vLaA9E&hl=en&fs=1]

In related news, Breakthrough is running a campaign against domestic violence called Bell Bajao. The campaign website says:

“Bell Bajao” (Ring the Bell) urges men to take a stand against domestic violence. One out of every three women faces violence behind closed doors, so whether it’s ringing a door bell to stop a crime, or speaking out, make sure you’re doing your part to ensure women and families in your communities are living free of violence. It’s about time we all stop being silent witnesses.

The campaign website has some interesting stuff — a blog you can contribute to, advertisements, ideas for community intervention and some videos. What is interesting is that it talks to men about taking action against domestic violence that they see around them. Here’s one of the videos:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AMpjibNGzo&hl=en&fs=1]

The media campaign has been released in collaboration with the Ministry of Women and Child Development and created pro bono by Ogilvy & Mather. Breakthrough also has is in its ‘toolkit’ other videos like the one below which I thought was interesting for its use of an identifiable and sympathetic situation with a popular song to talk about the issue.

So here’s a question: do you think advertisements, music videos, films can play a role in changing or affecting popular perception? Do you you think they can really inspire people to do something? Or do they remain in the realm of ‘nice to watch’ but ate forgotten once the next tv commercial comes along? What role, if any, can they play?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/3yBSeshQmSY&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x402061&color2=0x9461ca]

• raising awareness about gender-based violence as a human rights issue at the local, national, regional and international levels
• strengthening local work around violence against women
• establishing a clear link between local and international work to end violence against women
• providing a forum in which organizers can develop and share new and effective strategies
• demonstrating the solidarity of women around the world organizing against violence against women
• creating tools to pressure governments to implement promises made to eliminate violence against women

Not much in the Indian press about it except a few whimpers here and here though I’m wondering if the cringe-worthy hyperbole of the latter will do us more harm than good: “She lies there like a lifeless ragdoll beaten black and blue by the beast, She complains not, only her eyes well up with tears, precious tears Her muffled sobs an expression of her torture and torment She knows not for what she lives Always at the receiving end of her callous man’s ire and reproof She beats her breast in dismay…”. Good god. There should be a law against writing so badly, even if it is for a good cause. All I found in The Hindu was an article on Nov 26 being World Anti-Obesity Day. Frankly, I am surprised at this silence.

Infochange India, one of our favourite alternative news sources, has a special report on violence against women rising in Kerala. Aleyamma Vijayan answers the question of why a state that boasts India’s highest literacy levels should witness a 300% increase in violence against women.

Literacy and education do not change mindsets. In a deeply patriarchal society, education teaches women to be good wives and mothers. This attitude has been supplemented by missionary education, which brought with it a Victorian morality.

In this context, one must remember that Kerala is at the forefront of suicides in the country; around 36% of them are a result of family or marital problems. One would assume that large-scale migration out of Kerala to other countries has resulted in a change in attitude. But most people from this state go to work in the countries of the Middle East which are extremely traditional in their outlook towards women.

So here, factors like education and international exposure are debilitating rather than liberating in any way. This is something that’s been bothering me for a while, ever since Gita Aravamudan, author of Disappearing Daughters, pointed out that female foeticide is also more prevalent in richer, better-educated homes. I grew up on a staple diet of cliches regarding the world and social change and one of them had to do with education being the panacea for all ills. When will men stop beating up women? When will people not fight on religious grounds? When will caste be abolished? When everybody is educated. Were others also similarly reassured or was I the only one conned in this manner?

But of course, it is foolish to expect that ‘educated’ men and women will automatically behave in a particular manner when we have no fix on the nature of this education in the first place. The specifics of what education comprises differs from state to state, city to city, school to school. And as Vijayan points out, a vast majority of educational institutions are highly patriarchal.

I was lucky enough to attend a school and, particularly, a college that stood very strongly for women’s rights. (We even had a paper on Feminism as part of our BA course in English Literature and I suspect this changed my life in many ways.) This probably added to the misconception that education could truly change misogynistic or unbalanced attitudes. But the fact is that a vast majority of schools are run in a haphazard manner with idiots posturing as teachers. Children are encouraged to ask no questions and burdened with antiquated morals such as blind obedience, all of which build towards a culture of submissiveness. Girl children receive these messages at home as well, unlike boys who are let free to run and play or given larger helpings of food and treated like little gods. Little wonder then that when girls grow up to be women and receive a few sound whacks in their husband’s homes, they don’t even realise they should be complaining. They don’t even see it as “violence” a lot of the time.

Coming back to where I started off from, editors and senior journalists of prominent newspapers obviously do not think this is an issue worth discussing. So there is no series of columns giving insights into the various aspects and implications. No “Lead India”-like campaign in ToI. No railing editorials from aging and mostly senile columnists. (Shashi Tharoor, when you’re done with lamenting the fact that we Indian women are not wearing the sari any more, you think you could turn your attention to this?)

I get the disturbing sense that violence against women is so accepted within the framework of our society, something that we have become so used to, that it ceases to even horrify anymore.

Meanwhile, can you name 16 forms of violence against women? Are you sure you don’t know anyone facing one of these? Are you sure you’re not facing one of these yourself?

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Criminal justice law should be re-configured to put the victim’s experience and the victim’s need for protection at the centre of the law, transforming social ideas about blame of victims for the assaults they suffer. – An Amnesty International publication titled ‘Making Rights a Reality: The Duty of States to Address Violence Against Women’.

Women’s groups realized a long time ago that domestic violence is more than crime; it is a serious human rights violation. That the law’s fundamental understanding of violence against women needed to change — from something centred on dowry to a more comprehensive mental, psychological, sexual and economic violation. That a civil remedy was needed more than a criminal remedy.Civil remedies were available in personal laws, laws determined by religion or general civil law but these were very limited. Domestic violence in marriage was treated as a ‘private matter’ between two individuals and mediation was the most commonly adopted approach. Mediation usually usually aimed to cool conflicts, reach agreements and maintain the ‘institution’ of marriage. It insisted on maintaining family relationships inspite of violence and sometimes recommended drastic compromises to ‘save’ a marriage. Plus there was the notion that domestic violence happened because of ‘provocation’. Women had to battle with protracted criminal legal processes – and remain at the mercy of the abuser until the case was resolved. They were often pressurised by parents, relatives or the abuser to turn hostile in court and withdraw the case . (Then it was alleged that women were filing false cases. Statistics showed low conviction in cases of domestic violence and fueled the belief that the law was being misused.)

Why did so many women succumb to pressure and withdraw their case? Because they had no choice and little hope of relief. Resources were few, trials were prolonged and delayed, lawyers were expensive or incompetent, judges were insensitive and often failed to believe that domestic violence could include mental cruelty. At the end of it, they could look forward to a paltry sum towards alimony or a promise of divorce or unconditional custody of children or an ‘honorable’ exit from the messy and corrupt legal system. Nothing that would comprehensively address the mental, physical, economic and social damage undergone.

In this scenario, the new domestic violence law has come as a boon for women. The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (2005) is a gender-specific civil law that addresses the issue of domestic violence more comprehensively than ever before and provides for the woman’s immediate needs of protection from violence and violation of human rights.

Domestic violence is a complex phenomenon and involves multiple aspects. Situations range from women being thrown out of the house to getting no support from the natal family to having to leave their children behind to having no means of sustenance. The new law addresses these aspects by providing women with remedies such as monetary help, residence orders, protection from violence or compensation.

The act is one of the biggest achievements of the Indian women’s movement. After struggling for almost two and a half decades, the women’s movement succeeded in compelling the State to accept its responsibility to end violence — and not just by punishing the abuser. It is a step towards helping women out of from the dark and silent world of violence towards an environment of zero tolerance.

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