From: dheeraj@eng.umd.edu (Dheraj Sanghi)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.indian
Subject: Dowry Deaths: The real murderers (another REPOST)
Date: 26 Jan 1993 22:41:02 GMT
Organization: Project GLUE, University of Maryland, College Park
NNTP-Posting-Host: coke.eng.umd.edu

Yet another articles from my archives of yester-years.

-dheeraj

----------------------------

The following article appeared in the Express Magazine (Indian Express
Sunday Edition), April, 9, 1989 edition.  It has been written by Madhu
Kishwar, editor of Manushi.

------------
		Dowry Deaths: The real murderers

	The issue of dowry deaths has acquired great visibility
	in recent years but, says Madhu Kishwar, this focus
	obscures a more fundamental and insidious evil.  The
	real killer is not dowry, nor is it rapacious in-laws;
	it is the overwhelming pressure to keep a marriage
	going at all costs, no matter what the humiliation and
	suffering a woman has to undergo - and this is a
	process in which a woman's own family fully connives.


Every year, our newspapers dutifully report a number of deaths as caused by
"heat waves" and "cold waves."  The real killer is not hot or cold weather but
the inability of the person to keep body temperature at survival level - due
to undernutrition, inadequate shelter and clothing, or these factors combined
with illness or old age.  It is usually the destitute poor who die with a rise
or fall of temperature - almost never the better off.  The crucial cause is
not heat or cold.  Yet, we blindly go on attributing these deaths to severity
of weather conditions.

Similarly, in the last decade, we have built a misleading explanation of a
common type of killing of women that has come to be known as dowry murder or
dowry death.  In itself, dowry is rarely the cause of any woman's death.
Undoubtedly, many women are pressured by their husbands and in-laws to induce
their natal families into giving more cash and goods.  However, what kills a
woman is not her in-laws' greed but her inability effectively to resist these
demands and, if necessary, to walk out of a marriage which causes her
humiliation.

Just as the so-called "heat wave" and "cold wave" deaths cannot be stopped by
advising people not to live in hot or cold climates, but only by ensuring them
adequate nutrition, shelter and health care, so also, torture and violence
related to dowry demands cannot be stopped by calls for abolishing dowry.
Only by ensuring that no woman is condemned to a life of crippling dependence
on marriage, that every woman is capable of becoming self supporting, and will
not be socially ostracized for living without such a marriage, can we lessen
this slaughter.

The terms "dowry death" and "dowry murder" first began to be used around
1977-78 when investigations by women's organizations began to reveal that many
of the deaths of married women which had for years been camouflaged by the
police as accidents or suicides, were actually murders or induced suicides,
preceded by prolonged physical and mental torture at the hands of husband and
in-laws.  But, instead of just describing them as wife murders or induced
suicides, women's organizations and the media began to call them dowry deaths.

The reason why this happened are:

1.  To the women's parents, dowry demands loom the largest because this is the
one form of harassment which has to be borne by them as well.  All other forms
of torture have to be borne by the woman alone.  No amount of "adjustment" on
the woman's part will do in this case - it is her father who has to "adjust"
to the demands for more wealth.  That is why this particular form of
harassment pinches the woman's family most and eclipses all else in their
minds.

2.  If the woman is killed and thrown out by he husband, her parents have yet
another reason to project dowry demands as the primary or only cause of
harassment - they hope to get the dowry back.

3.  In their narrative to the police or social worker or in their petitions to
the court, the woman and her family are compelled to highlight dowry demands
and to downplay other problems, because "dowry demands" are perhaps the only
form of harassment that will be unequivocally condemned even by the police.
Society and its officials have yet to agree that wife beating is wrong, in the
way they have officially agreed that dowry demands are wrong.  So highlighting
these demands is one of the simplest ways to get a complaint taken seriously
and registered as a criminal case.  This bias becomes irreversible once it
enters police and court records.

4.  Both the media and women's groups have focussed mainly on deaths and
atrocities on urban women from lower middle class to upper middle class
backgrounds, because these are the groups which are more likely to approach
women's organizations for help.  Also these social classes are setting the
pace for increase in dowry transactions.  Among these groups torture of a
young wife is likely to be accompanied by demands for additional payments in
cash or kind though that is almost never the single point for torturing the
woman.

5.  Wife murder is no less frequent among the poorer classes both in rural and
urban areas.  Wives get battered to death among the urban poor and landless
poor in villages more often over quarrels resulting from money disputes,
accusations of extramarital relations and objections to the woman's not
providing money for the man's liquor.  In most of these cases among the very
poor, dowry demands are not an important theme.  But, because we have paid
much less attention to violence among the poor, it has helped the myth that
most wife murders are linked to dowry demands.

The national and international media have projected these deaths as a species
of crime unique to India, but, in fact, they have much in common with violence
against women the world over.  It is well known that battering of wives and
girlfriends is widespread even in societies where dowry is not practised, such
as Europe or America, or, closer home, in tribal communities in India which do
not practise dowry.

The reason why many more wives end up dead in India than say in the US is not
that Indian men are inherently more murderous or Indian women have any special
inclination for enduring beatings to the point of death.  It is primarily
because an average woman in Europe or the USA is not likely to feel as
pressured to "adjust" to a violent marriage as her counterpart in India.  Life
as a divorced woman is difficult even in the US or Europe but it is not seen
as an utter shame and disaster.  A woman is not as dependent on her natal
family for support if she wishes to separate from a violent husband, even
though their support may be of some help.  She usually has marketable skills
and can get a job, if only as a childminder or domestic help.  Frequently, she
can obtain a white collar job or something even better, despite having entered
the job market rather late in life.  Even if unemployed, she can often get
some welfare benefits, childcare and schooling for her children as well as
some kind of subsidized housing.  Though almost always inadequate for her
needs, these alternative sources are of help.  She also has a relatively
better chance than an Indian woman of getting alimony and child support from
her husband.

Yet, many Western women hesitate to leave their violent marriages.  Often,
they go on taking beatings for years before they walk out.  One reason, among
others, is that their standard of living ass a single parent is likely to fall
drastically.  Female headed households, in the US, for example, are generally
much poorer than male headed households.  Yet, since survival with some
measure of dignity is possible outside marriage, many more women in the US and
Europe are likely to walk out of marriage before marital violence begins to
assume deadly forms.  Even so, very many end up grievously injured, some dead.

Wife battering, whether in India or in the West, cannot be attributed to
women's qualities or the lack of them.  Its purpose is to humiliate, and to
destroy a woman's sense of self esteem so that she comes to accept a
subordinate and servile role.  One reason for its being more deadly in India
than in the West may be that a husband in the West generally performs this
task on his own, while in India he is often actively assisted by other members
of his family.

If wife beating in India results in the death of a much higher proportion of
married women than in the US or Europe, it is not because dowry is practised
in India and not in those countries.  It is because an average woman in India
can walk out of her marriage only if her natal family supports her.  Most
women including women from educated middle class families, are not equipped
economically and educationally, to get even a moderately paying job on their
own strength.  They need help in the form of contacts which male relatives
must provide.  Many have only domestic work and childcare skills.  In our
society, it is not considered respectable for middle class women to do this
kind of work for pay, nor is it sufficiently renumerative to provide a decent
living wage.  If she has children, it is very difficult for her to hold down a
full time job, unless someone in her family is willing to share responsibility
for childcare.

Assuming a woman is reasonably well employed, housing is a severe problem.  It
is extremely expensive, especially in relatively "respectable", safe, urban
areas.  Even if she can pay, there are strong prejudices against renting to
divorced or single woman.  In villages, living alone as a divorced woman
without severe harassment is near impossible, unless a woman has grown-up
sons.  In addition, a rural woman has very few employment options and can
usually survive only if she has some land to till.  Unless she is from a poor
landless family, there is a stigma attached to her working for a wage outside
the home.  Since few women own land they have no option but to endure
maltreatment in the marital home if their parents refuse them shelter.

In most cases, fathers and brothers, who are the deciding authorities, are
most reluctant to let a woman come back, since they fear she will become a
lifelong liability.  Brothers also fear that once she is back, with her
children, she might even pressure her parents to give her or her children a
share in the property.  Therefore, they and the rest of the family keep
advising her to go back and "adjust" in the husband's home.  Their parting
words at the time of "vidai" indicate this:  "We are sending your 'doli'
today; may only your 'arthi' emerge from that house."  THIS PRESSURE TO KEEP
THE MARRIAGE GOING AT ALL COSTS IS THE REAL KILLER OF WOMEN, RATHER THAN DOWRY
OR THE LACK OF IT.

In those communities where a woman is not treated as a social outcast if she
leaves her husband, wife battering does not lead to death as often, regardless
of whether or not dowry is important.  For example, among most tribal
communities, it is commonly observed that often women themselves take the
initiative to walk out on a violently abusive husband.  Even though among most
tribal communities in India, barring the north east, women lose the right to
be maintained by their natal family after they marry, tribal women have one
distinct advantage.  Culturally, there is no taboo on their fending for
themselves and living on their own.  A Ho, Santhali or Munda woman may not get
her father or brothers to give her shelter or the right to work on the family
land, but she can go to work on a construction site or a brick kiln.  If she
is lucky, she can save some money, return to the village, procure some land
with her savings, till it, and set up house on her own.  She may remarry if
she wishes.  More important, the consequences of remaining single are not
deadly.  No great stigma is attached to it.  In most communities in India,
however, women are made to suffer a heavy stigma for leaving even violent
marriages.

People who bemoan the cruelty of in-laws for torturing a woman and monetary
demands, often omit to mention that a father who allows his daughter to be
tortured is no less hardhearted.  The only effective way to stop the torture
of a daughter is to help her to get away.  But most fathers hesitate to do
this.  They continue supplying fuel to the fire by meeting all kinds of
outrageous demands and encouraging their daughters to grovel even more.
Fathers are more willing to pay large amounts to a son-in-law who tortures
their daughter than to put the same amounts in the daughter's hands to help
her lead a life of independence and dignity.

These extortionist demands need to be stripped of the legitimacy that the
girl's family provides them by making out that they they succumb to them out
of concern for the daughter's welfare.  By no stretch of imagination should
they be called dowry demands.  They are no better than bribes to the in-laws
to cajole them into keeping the daughter-in-law in the house on their own
terms.  The purpose of fulfilling these demands is to prevent the woman being
sent back to her parents, not to ensure a dignified life for her.  In a way
her situation is even worse than that of a person taken hostage, because the
family of such a victim pays ransom money to secure the release of the
hostage.  The parents of the married woman keep paying in order to ensure that
she stays a permanent hostage, in the hope that one day she will be accepted
as a member of the husband's family.

It is important to recognize that while a woman's parents make a relatively
greater fuss about the payments that the son-in-law's family tries to extort
from them, they are more willing to condone many other forms of torture of
their daughter.  Dowry demands are never the single point around which a
bride's maltreatment revolves.  She is likely to be humiliated and beaten on
almost any pretext - for giving birth to a daughter, for the way she cooks,
for her good looks or lack of them, for overeducation or undereducation, for
having a job or for being unemployable, for wanting to maintain regular
contact with her parents, or for various imagined or real acts of omission and
commission by her and her natal family.  The harassment and violence is
motivated by the desire to crush her sense of self, and make her accept as
inevitable whatever is demanded of her as a subordinate in the household.

Often the parents of the woman are willing parties in helping her in-laws make
her a slave.  If her husband objects to her job, the advice of her father is
likely to be:  "Better give it up in the interests of family harmony."  If he
objects to her meeting her friends or even meeting her parents and siblings,
the parents will often admonish her:  "After all, your husband is most
important.  You have to live with him, so why annoy him by keeping up
associations he does not like."  The process of self effacement is supposed to
proceed until she learns totally to submerge her interests in those of her
husband and his family.

The logic of romanticizing such slavish self effacement leads to annihilation
in a significant number of cases.  A slave cannot command respect.  The more
she "adjusts" to humiliation and violence, the more contempt she receives, the
less her life is valued.  That such "adjustment" does not come naturally to
women is borne out by the fact that they generally reach out to their parents
for help, plead to be recalled, and declare that they cannot endure such
maltreatment.  In most wife murder cases, parents themselves testify that the
daughter frequently complained or returned to the parental home.  But they
sent her back, often against her wishes, assuring her all would be well if she
learnt more patience.  Each time a woman returns to her marital home on her
in-laws' terms, she is a more demoralized person, and her husband and in-laws'
contempt for her grows.  Her return is proof that she has no option but to
accept life on whatever terms they offer her.  This encourages them to be even
more unrestrained in their violence.

In almost all wife murder cases, death is not the result of the first incident
of violence.  Some of these murders may be premeditated.  Sometimes, the whole
family conspires to annihilate the daughter-in-law.  More frequently, however,
the murder is the unpremeditated result of an especially brutal battering.  To
cover up the battering and murder, they often try to burn the dead body.
Pouring kerosine is often the end point, not the starting point.  The
important thing is that, whether premeditated or accidental, most of these
murders are preceded by the women being subjected to various kinds and degrees
of violence.  In most cases, she is aware of the imminent danger to her life
and informs her parents of it.  The violence may begin with a slap to which
the response of her parents is likely to be "What does a slap matter?  He is
after all your husband.  You can't break your marriage because of a slap."
Since the woman generally has no choice but to endure it without a response,
the exercise of violence inevitably develops its own logic.  From slaps, it
progresses to kicks, to beatings with a stick, to a savage assault that proves
fatal.

Just as rape is not primarily the result of sexual hunger but is primarily a
manifestation of contempt and hatred towards women, so battering, whether
accompanied by monetary demands or by any other demand, such as that a woman
break off associations with friends or natal family, is part of a larger
syndrome - that of telling her that her life is not her own, and her husband
and her family can use or abuse her as they please.

The "reasons" adduced by a wife batterer are no more than pretexts.  To search
for such reasons is to assume that this kind of violence is reasoned and can
be stopped if the reasons are removed.  Let me illustrate the point.  While
doing a survey of cases handled by the Crimes Against Women police cell, we
witnessed a woman police officer recording a woman's complaint.  The woman was
showing her bruises and saying that her husband frequently beat her.  The
officer asked why he did so.  She replied:  "Just like that.  No reason."  The
officer persisted:  "There must be some reason."  After repeated questioning,
the woman finally gave in, and said that the latest beating was triggered off
by her not having washed the clothes `on time'."  The officer triumphantly
exclaimed:  "I knew there must be some reason."  This interpretation is an
imposition on the woman's lived experience that the beating is unreasoned,
uncalled for, an instrumentation of subjugation.  It only ends up trying to
make her feel more guilty.  The implication is that if she did not do anything
wrong, she would not get beaten.

This, in a way, is also the implication of antidowry campaigners.  They think
that if a woman refused to take dowry, she would not be tortured or driven to
death.  This is an incorrect assumption.  We have dealt with scores of wife
battering cases where dowry was not an issue at all.  Yet, the abuse and
violence were no less deadly.

The fact that violence around dowry demands has acquired the greatest
visibility has had important negative consequences for the combating of the
problem of marital violence in India.  By not calling these deaths wife
murders, no different from wife murders in the other parts of the world
(except in their frequency, due to the lack of viable options for women
outside marriage), we have in a way done a great disservice to women of this
country.  They are somehow put in the dock for not having the courage or the
sense to resist dowry marriages.  The already guilt ridden woman in India is
made to feel even more guilty for having brought violence on herself.  Also,
other forms of humiliation and other unjust demands are glossed over and seen
as relatively unimportant.  If a man does not demand dowry, his other
unreasonable demands - that a woman should discontinue her education, give up
her job, break off her friendships, and so on, are treated as trivial and not
worth making a fuss about.

The high frequency with which young women end up dead in our society is also
related to the tyrannical socialization process they are made to undergo when
they switch from the natal to the marital family.  We are more willing to
condemn the relatively small number of wife murder cases, but most people are
not yet willing to challenge the more systematic and regular process of
demeaning physical and mental treatment meted out to most women.  This begins
with the assumption that when a woman marries, her natal family loses all
rights over her, and surrenders responsibility for her well being.  It
continues in the belief that it is disgraceful for her to have an independent
social and economic status that is not approved and supervised by her marital
family.  She is not free to interact with whoever she chooses.  She is
required to surrender the right to make decisions affecting her life to her
husband's family.

We must realize that severe abuse is inherent in such a system of
socialization.  The culture of contempt and violence, sometimes ending in
murder in a minority of cases, draws legitimacy from the widely prevalent
system of sanctions whereby women are routinely humiliated, until they learn
to submerge their identity in the plans of the head of the marital family.
That is why, for every one woman who ends up dead, there are thousands who are
made to live physically and psychologically maimed lives.  Undoubtedly, there
are many others who are fortunate and malleable enough to be treated with
relatively greater consideration.  Some eventually succeed to a degree of
power and influence, mostly in implementing the family's head's wishes in
household affairs, especially as they grow older.

The vast number of murders we are witnessing today are mainly the extreme
byproduct of an inhuman system of exploiting women, getting them to give up
their own hopes and live to serve others in whatever manner is required of
them.  The murders cannot be stopped merely by police and legal methods.  They
can be combated only if we work hard to bring about the following changes:

1.  Guarantee inalienable economic and property rights to women in their own
names.

2.  Build a culture wherein it is not a stigma for a woman to control and
manage her own life and economic affairs.

3.  Educate parents not to treat their daughters as 'paraya dhan' {someone
else's property}, but to consider it their moral obligation to look after
their welfare both before and after marriage, or without marriage.

4.  Fight against the severe societal restrictions on women's housing, choice
of vocation and associations.

5.  Most of all, we need to change the pervasive popular cultural ideal of
womanhood.  The romanticized image of woman as a selfless giver, someone who
goes on giving to the very end, gracefully, smilingly, whatever the demand,
however unreasonable and however harmful to herself, has become a virtual
death trap for too many of us.

We need to recognize that this is not just an enforced ideal, but has become
part of the positive self image of many women.  The ideal of self effacing
woman who gives bountifully to her family is attractive to women not because
Indian women are masochists, but because most human beings do aspire to live
lives which go beyond individual self seeking and narrow calculations about
returning favor for favor.  The urge to submerge one's own narrow interests in
the larger interests of the family, the kin and community is not, in itself,
to be condemned.  Nor will we succeed if we ask women to become narrowly self
centered.  We have to rebuild our family structure and ethos in a way that
there is real choice and reciprocity in giving and receiving, so that women
are not beaten into being beasts of burden and denied a sense of self worth
while giving to others.

-- 
Dheeraj Sanghi			(h):301-474-3592	(o):301-405-2723
Internet: dheeraj@cs.umd.edu	UUCP: uunet!mimsy!dheeraj
I asked a Burmese why women, after centuries of following their men, now walk
ahead. He said there were many unexploded land mines since the war. - Mueller
Newsgroups: soc.culture.indian,soc.culture.indian.telugu