Prajnya
2021 Gender Violence in India Report Launch
Rukmini Sen, AUD 25/11/21
Good morning everyone. My sincere
thanks to Prajnya for having me be part of the launch of their flagship and
extremely significant Gender Violence in India Report 2021. I am especially
delighted that this launch coincides with the launch of the 16 days of activism
and International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women—today the
25th of November. While I am certain that most in this audience are aware, yet
I would like to remind us that on,
November 25, 1960, the three Mirabal sisters—Patria, Minerva
and Maria Teresa were brutally assassinated because of their identity as women
and activists. Their only crime was having fought for their rights against the
Dominican dictator, Rafael Trujillo helped to organize and grow the underground
movement challenging the regime. The state’s murder of the three sisters, aged
36, 34 and 25 on Nov. 25 1960, outraged the public and was a key trigger for
Trujillo’s own
assassination by a group of dissidents and former allies six months later.
After the transition to democracy in the late 1970’s, the Butterflies, as Dominicans call the sisters,
became symbols of both democratic and feminist resistance. On December 20,
1993, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the
Elimination of Violence against Women. Their goal was to eradicate violence
against women and girls on a global scale. On February 7, 2000, the UN
officially designated November 25th as the International day for the
Elimination of Violence Against Women. Today starts the 16 days of activism,
ending on December 10th, Human Rights Day. Remembering state impunity on any
form of resistance and specifically being threatened by any form of resilient solidarities,
I would like us to salute the fighting spirits of all women and people of
multiple genders encountering, negotiating, surviving violence in their homes,
workplaces, streets, or caught in the crossfires of ‘conflicts’. It is equally
important to foreground the importance of care and support that is needed as we
engage with violence. This year’s theme “Orange the World: End Violence against
Women Now” aims to a) Advocate for inclusive, comprehensive and long-term
strategies to prevent and eliminate VAW b)
Amplify the success stories demonstrating that VAWG is preventable c)
Promote the leadership of women and girls in their diversity and their
meaningful participation in policy making and decision making and d) Engage
Generation Equality Forum commitment makers in your country or region to
collaborate in the implementation of bold new commitments. Linking the UN theme
and the Prajnya report findings in a co-relation, this talk is proposed to be
divided into the following sections:
1.
Conceptual and methodological questions in Prajnya’s
report
2.
Studying violence, researching violence
3.
Talking care alongside violence
Conceptual and methodological
questions in Prajnya’s report
The most important aspect of the
report, not just this year, but over the years is the use of NCRB data since
1955 to highlight the different categorisation of crimes against women. This
quantitative classification, is a good example of both—numbers and narratives
behind numbers. From which year a particular crime was identified and started
getting calculated gives an indication on what is the kind of data that the
NCRB is intending to collect. Also, enactment of specific laws lead to
enumeration of certain kinds of criminal acts against women. The extent to
which intersectional information is available is for crimes against SC and ST
women (including outraging the modesty, kidnapping, rape), while girl children
form a separate category in cyber crimes and minor girls in trafficking. Since
2018, identifying rape of a women with physical/mental disability and rape of
pregnant woman is happening separately. There are sixteen categories of gender
based violence that is discussed in the report following a consistent form—a)
what is the nature of the violence in question, b) the manner in which
international human rights conventions/protocols define this violence, c) data
available on the violence from government sources, international agencies,
Indian human rights fact finding reports d) existing laws and the specific
provisions in the Indian Penal Code that address the gender based violence in
question e) recent newspaper based reporting and news on the specific violence
f) ways of accessing the criminal justice system when the specific violence has
occurred and g) brief discussion on the decisions coming in recent judicial
pronouncements around the violence. As someone who has been teaching and
writing on gender based violence for many years now, this is a very
comprehensive approach and also with the annual reports all available online,
it is a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners to compare and see
trajectories of violence over the years. The FIR ready reckoner as the Appendix
is equally relevant and tells the reader the before and after of the FIR
together with steps/processes/officers that needs to be remembered at the
police station. While violence on women with disabilities specifically does not
form a part of this report, I was wondering whether it can find some space,
although this disaggregated data is not collected through NCRB, yet Prajnya
together with Shanta Memorial Rehabilitation Centre did come out with a report
on sexual and gender based violence against women with disabilities in 2020,
where the sites of violence was earmarked—public spaces, institutional contexts
and violence related to structural inequality. I want to refer to a recent case
Patan Jamal Vali v State of Andhra Pradesh in the Supreme Court of India
arising out of Special Leave Petition. The case involved a 19-year-old blind
woman who was raped by her brother’s
friend. The court in its April judgment, rendered by Justice Chandrachud, using
the lens of intersectionality where caste, gender and disability where all
entangled, acknowledged the threat of sexual violence for women and girls with
disabilities as “an all-too-familiar
fixture of their lives.” It sets
straight that women with disabilities are not weak, helpless, or incapable: “Such a negative presumption of disability translating
into incapacity would be inconsistent with the forward-thinking
conceptualization of disabled lives embodied in our law and, increasingly,
albeit slowly, in our social consciousness.” The judgment went ahead to record that he National
Crimes Record Bureau should seriously consider the possibility of maintaining
disaggregated data on gender based violence women with disability. In another
context, while since 2016 the NCRB is adding transgender among trafficked
victims or those ‘rescued’ yet that may not truly represent the magnitude of
crimes against transgender persons. A 2015 report by Sangama of Kerala,
highlighted high rates of violence against transgender persons, particularly
perpetrated by police personnel. More than half (52%) of the respondents said
they had been harassed by the police and nearly all (96%) said they had not
raised a complaint because of their gender identity. The government has not
initiated any survey or census on important issues that affect the transgender
community," said Kalki Subramaniam, founder and director of Sahodari Foundation on the lack of
countrywide data addressing transgender issues. "We have no data on how
many transgender persons are educated, how many are uneducated, how many are
homeless, how many live with their families and how many live on the streets.
While more detailed discussions on violence against transgenders and women with
disabilities would further enrich these reports, I sincerely hope that these
reports will find a way into reading lists of students pursuing gender studies,
interdisciplinary law courses, or human rights education, and make engagements
not only with the content but also the methods in which the content is
gathered.
Studying violence,
researching violence
Gail Omvedt, whom we lost earlier this
year, in a classic contribution in 1990 Violence against Women: New Movements
and New Theories in India makes two very fundamental arguments—a) the pervasive
violence against women has an obvious economic function—in keeping women under
control, in preventing them from going out of the home, forcing them to the
most low paid or unpaid forms of labour and b) the close connection of violence
with sexuality—does violence necessarily have a sexual character and is
sexuality inherently linked to the force and dominance or can we locate social
and historical facts that determine the nature of the linkage? And c) the need
to look at different forms of violence confronted by different sections of
women—the relationship between violence and caste/class/rural-urban divisions, nationality
and other divisions. While Origins of Family, Private Property and the State by
Frederich Engels gives us one kind of theoretical explanation about the
interconnection between women-economy-exploitation; the other argument is got
from the Phule-Periyar-Ambedkarite traditions and engaging with questions of
marriage-sexuality and brahmanical patriarchy. Marriage, for Periyar, regulated
and disciplined women’s
familial and reproductive labour, even as it actively denied their desires and
rights to a self-respecting life of their choice. As V Geetha wrote in her
essay “The Story of a Marriage: Being a Tale of Self-Respect Unions and What
Happened to Them”, self-Respect marriages refused the services of brahmin
priests but did not insist that these should be replaced by either non-brahmin
or Tamil priests. The Self-Respect marriage form was premised on the idea of
revocability and with the freedom to part being inscribed into the marriage
ideal, no guarantees could possibly be given or taken, except of course those
which were voluntarily agreed upon by the couple in question7. Often these
guarantees had to do with love, companionship and want and, in insisting on
these as the founding premises of marriage. In the contexts of ‘honour’ killings
and ‘love jihad’ talking about self respect marriages is a radical step as the
Allahabad High Court pronounces in September 2021 that two adults have the
rights to marry whoever they want, irrespective of their religion. The judgment
adds, ‘As the present petition is a joint petition by the two individuals who
claims to be in love with each other and are major, therefore, in our
considered opinion, nobody, not even their parents, could object to their
relationship’. What the judiciary is pronouncing today, is what we could
remember Dr B R Ambedkar writing in his famous Annihilation of Caste (1936)
speech, “I am convinced that the real remedy is intermarriage. Fusion of blood
can alone create the feeling of being kith and kin, and unless this feeling of
kinship, of being kindred, becomes paramount, the separatist feeling—the
feeling of being aliens—created by caste will not vanish”.
In a recently completed course on
Marriage, Kinship and Family Forms in 2020, with undergraduate Sociology
students at AUD, students said how they felt that the course had organically
led to discussions on violence and feminism and had posed the question to me
can we sociologically study family in separation from violence? This seemed to
resonate with Kalpana Kannabiran’s point of departure in the edited book
Violence Studies—Violence is embedded in our everyday. We encounter not only
its overt, raw, and brutal nature but also the deeply buried invisible and
insidious forms that normalise violence in the collective conscience, making it
less noticeable and more tolerable.
On the other hand, while doing a
course on ‘Violence: Feminist Critiques and Resistances’ with Gender Studies
students in 2018 again at AUD, the ordinariness of violence, not the
event-driven ones but the everyday ones, not the ones which only make ‘national’
headlines but also the ones that are projected as politicised or political,
invariably the instances where intersectionality of the violence is evident—Hathras
(about which Kalpana Kannabiran spoke in last year’s lecture) and Unnao (which
finds mention twice in this year’s Prajnya report). Through this course we had
done an exercise of 'walking the city’ as a group of people with identifying
themselves through multiple genders—in the evening, in an area which is
historically significant (The Qutb and Mehrauli archaeological complex) and yet
is not explored as a site for feminist ‘classroom’. My praxis was to walk is to
know and knowing is the first step towards overcoming fear and developing a
feminist consciousness. In the assignment, on of the students reflected ‘This
took the form of an experiential walk because it not only assured us that
public spaces are in reality supposed to be ‘public’ but because each one of us
who shared this experience now holds the narrative that affirms faith in
solidarity’.
I want to end this section by talking
about the need to interrogate the legal language and practices through which
violence is juridically expressed. Thinking with Professor Upendra Baxi (Taking
Suffering Seriously) that it is important for one major institution of
governance to take people's miseries seriously. He says, “For these who take
people's sufferings seriously, there is no rejoicing; even revolutions provide
transient occasions of celebration”. In the
language and practice of law, the insistence on certainty, the need to
translate the suffering or experience of violence into a language of
reasonableness in order for it to be judicially recognised need to be
questioned not just in the courts of law but also in the way law is taught. The
French feminist Anne Leclerc wrote, “All I want is my voice, you let me speak,
yes, but I don’t want your voice, I want my own….I have to reveal everything
that you have so determinedly hidden….the only thing you demand insistently is
our silence…” While clearly silence around violence against women has been
broken in many ways, and that is also evident in the number of reported cases
having gone up; yet they still continue in connection to social and state based
hierarchies and definitely in connection to modes of accepted expressions of
the violence.
Talking care alongside violence
I will conclude by pointing out
something that we all are aware of—the shadow pandemic with the global health
pandemic that we encountered. The National Commission for Women has noted there
was a 46 per cent rise in complaints of crimes against women in the first eight
months of 2021 over the corresponding period of last year. Of the 19,953
complaints received between January to July 2020, the highest number of 7,036
were recorded under the right to live with dignity clause, followed by 4,289
complaints of domestic violence and 2,923 complaints of harassment of married
women or dowry harassment, the NCW said. The right to live with dignity clause
takes into account the emotional abuse of women. Inclusion of emotional abuse
under right to live with dignity is definitely a significant move and it brings
me to argue that it is necessary to talk care, support, friendships together
with discussions on violence. In my own 2020 piece in EPW Stay Home, Stay Safe:
Interrogating Domestic Violence, I suggest that we need to push the contours of
discussion to re-conceptualise home/domesticity—initiate talking about various
kinds of shared residencies not only the ones formed through heterosexual
monogamous marriage, and foreground the political importance of affordable,
abuse-free community housing for women. And when I say this I am not talking
about shelter homes but the right to housing and shelter. The pandemic, again,
and more formidably proved to us how care and support networks outside of the
familial became valuable—for surviving and sustaining. There is a need for
feminist support groups and conversations at workplaces, much beyond the administrative
requirements of setting up an Internal Complaints Committee. These support
groups need to talk about everyday gendered misogyny in the wake of the
concerns raised through #MeToo as well as the deeply troubling Tejpal judgment.
The Persons with Disabilities Act 2016 gives a functional/service oriented
understanding of care. Care as feeling is assumed and naturalised even within a
legislative framework, while care in the affective sense is silenced. I propose
that it is needed to articulate that ethics of care, taking into account the
exploits of the care economy but also propagating a feminist politics of
interdependence and care alongside violence for a sustainable just future.
Thanks again to Prajnya and wishing
them the best for the all the subsequent 16 days activism programmes.
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