Intimate violence, family, and femininity: women's narratives on their construction of violence and self.

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Intimate Violence, Family, and Femininity: Women's Narratives on Their Construction of Violence and Self Nishi Mitra Violence Against Women published online 20 October 2013 DOI: 10.1177/1077801213506287 The online version of this article can be found at: http://vaw.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/10/18/1077801213506287

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VAWXXX10.1177/1077801213506287MitraMitra

Article

Intimate Violence, Family, and Femininity: Women’s Narratives on Their Construction of Violence and Self

Violence Against Women XX(X) 1–20 © The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1077801213506287 vaw.sagepub.com

Nishi Mitra1

Abstract In the context of a high threshold for violence in everyday living and the cultural value of the institution of family, this article looks at women’s narratives from counseling settings in India to comment on the cultural processes of explaining and rationalizing domestic violence that silence women. Definitions of femininity, marriage, and motherhood in India that are hinged on women’s responsibility toward holding a family together have obstructed an understanding of women’s individual rights and of violations of these rights. There is need to address both the public and professionals on the specific nature of domestic violence, and its ideological and structural context for creating recognition of the issue as a major social problem. Keywords femininity, intimate violence, women’s definitions Homes connote a space of love and safety, togetherness, sharing and self-sacrifice. Ordinarily when we talk of violence, it is difficult for people to admit that family and homes can be the sites of “real” violence.1 This is especially the case in India, which is a society with a high threshold for violence, and where life is defined overwhelmingly by intense and pervasive structural violence in terms of poverty, hunger, caste, and class inequities, unemployment, and communal strife (Agarwal, 1988; Kannabiran, 2005, Kannabiran & Menon, 2007; Kapadia, 2002; Kelkar, 1992).2 Violence in the 1Tata

Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

Corresponding Author: Nishi Mitra, Centre for Women’s Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Deonar, Mumbai 400088, Maharashtra, India. Email: [email protected]


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general parlance in India brings to mind aggression, brutality, cruelty, and butchery: fierceness associated with carnage and bloodshed (Das, 1990). To be able to create recognition for domestic violence in India as a major social problem that needs public attention, we need to be able to understand its specific nature and context, and to define it beyond the regularly accepted meanings and explanations of the term “violence” in our society (Bhattacharya, 2004; Keshwar, 1996). Moreover, since any representation of violence is itself a political act, it is important that a feminist investment in it is responsive to women’s deepest concerns, conflicts, and ambivalence, their voices as well as their silences (Menon, 2000; Subadra, 1999; Thapan, 1995). Unfortunately, women’s words, experiences, and voices have been ignored or downplayed in a significant amount of research on domestic violence in India, so as to control subjectivity and to develop theoretical explanations that help in understanding and addressing the problem at the level of policy change. As a consequence of this, the language of feeling, of ambivalence, confusion, conflicts, loss, and pain has not always surfaced in the discourses that are built around women’s victimization in homes. Instead, we have the researchers’ and practitioners’ more logical, coherent, and integrated theses and explanations on causes, correlations, and patterns that are ideologically colored and often motivated by concerns to improve intervention programs or to address violence against women-related funding and resource issues. This is certainly needed; yet, it is often not enough to help women realistically survive and transcend violent relationships.3 This article seeks to understand the meanings of violence to women complainants through personal, in-depth, open-ended, and unstructured interviews, conducted in two counseling cells in India. The interviews were conducted in such a way that it became possible to explore the spaces within the normative map of “home” in the Indian context, where violence is regularly enacted and re-enacted, and to glimpse into the very private space of personal pain, disillusionment, and confusion. In so doing, this article simultaneously questions marriage and the widespread belief in the security and normative values of this institution in defining gender relations, religion, and culture, and opposes certain accounts of domestic violence that depict the complex experience of intimate living in simplistic and alienating ways.

Background I draw primarily from accounts of 10 women whom I interviewed in two family counseling cells4 (all names have been changed). Before discussing the women’s narratives, I will introduce the context of family counseling cells in India from which the data were collected. Family counseling cells in India are of many kinds; however, the most organized ones relate to the schemes of the Central Social Welfare Board, Government of India. The Government provides grants to non-government agencies running welfare schemes for women and children at the grassroots level and those working in the area of atrocities against women . . . for a range of preventive, curative and rehabilitative services to women.


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Distressed women can approach these cells for intervention, investigation in dowry deaths, counseling in family maladjustment, and reconciliation in cases of separation, out of courts settlement in family disputes or even for referral services like state run or supported short stay homes, free legal aid, police assistance and so on. (Mitra, 2000)

The initiative has developed from the state’s concern for rising atrocities against women, and family counseling cells are seen as agencies that can prevent break-up of families and promote harmony through suitable intervention. Typically, these organizations entertain complaints from women and men, and the process entails registration of complaint, interview with the complainant, calling the other party, interview with the other party, home visits and investigation, joint meetings with conflicting parties, and arrival at a compromise with follow-up visits, if needed. I conducted participant observation and interviews for 1 year in two counseling cells in Mumbai, one supported by a women’s group and another by the Mumbai Police and a premier social work institution. The total number of cases of marital conflict that were registered at the two centers in the course of a year of my fieldwork was 137, yet it would be proper to point out that many more women approach the centers than the ones who finally register. Most of the women and men using these services belong to the lower and middle income groups. At both cells, the maximum number of complainants (approximately 46%-49%) was in the age group 25 to 34 years, and approximately 30% to 32% of women complainants were in the age group 18 to 24 years. Many women reported violence quite early in marriage: 26% in less than a year of marriage; 59% within 6 years of marriage; and 33% between 7 and 21 years of marriage. Some of the complainants (6%) had lived for about three decades in a violent marriage before they came out into the open and complained about the harassment in their marital home. Most complainants were not well educated: 8% were illiterate, 20% had studied up to Grade 5, and 60% up to Grade 10. About 33% to 50% of the complainants were employed women. Many of them worked as domestic workers, petty vendors, laborers, and daily wage workers. Some were clerks, nurses, teachers, or tailors.

Findings and Discussion Nature of Problems Reported by Complainants Women come with a variety of problems, reporting violence in conjunction with demands for dowry, periodic or complete desertion, adultery, alcoholism, the suspicious nature of the husband, or the husband’s unemployment or lack of responsibility etc. The complaints involve not only the husband, but often his family members, especially his mother and unmarried sisters, but also other relatives such as fathers-in-law, brothers-in-law, their spouses, the husband’s second wife or mistress, or his cousins. The violence reported is not merely related to dowry demands, although it is that form of marital violence that occupies the limelight in police and media discourse on the issue of domestic violence in India (A. Gandhi, 1997; N. Gandhi & Shah, 1993).


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The most frequently reported violence is a regular, routine kind involving mental and physical harassment from husbands and in-laws. Counseling is the most commonly provided assistance to all the complainants. This counseling, however, is not what may be considered professional psychological counseling. It is rather what may be described as conciliatory advice and information for referrals. Other kinds of assistance include legal aid, police assistance, and referrals to hospitals and institutional shelters. One cannot generalize from the selected narratives in this article; the details are meaningful only in that they facilitate an understanding of the everyday experience of violence and abuse for women.

What Is Violence? Violence in intimate relationships is difficult to define and hotly contested (Geetha, 1998; Kakar, 1990; Thapan, 2009). This is evident from the volatility of emotions exchanged in the counseling cells, with accusations and counter accusations made by men and women and their families seeking intervention. Even more, the cultural and language context is important to understand in terms of what gets defined as violence (Das, 1998). Women’s narratives reveal a range of violence, some very concrete and consisting of physical and mental manifestations of violent abuse, but many others describing subtle forms of violence that are more ambiguous because they are about pain and disillusionment in relationships. These need to be interpreted alongside cultural notions of family and spousal responsibilities shared between men and women. Often, it is these shared notions that are in conflict and are contested, for violence lies on the edge of what is at risk of interpretation as lack of love or interest, neglect, misunderstandings, and ignorance. These do not generally get classified as violence, unless we expand the routine and accepted definitions of how we understand it. For example, I am some four years older to him but this did not really matter to him till now when he started routinely criticizing me for being too fat. He says I look too old and he feels ashamed if I sit behind him on his motor bike. He forgets that I am mother to his two children. I feel so rejected. Ours was after all a love marriage and I accepted everything about him. I never thought of myself . . . I served his family completely. I even left my job for him . . . and now he likes my sister more than me! (Gurpreet, 35 years old, married for 9 years)

This narrative demonstrates a conflict that is embedded in changing definitions of marriage, masculinity, and femininity. The violence of fragmented notions on tradition and modernity in present-day India that stand in contest are demonstrated in the requirement of a wife who looks younger than the husband, the legitimacy and rights of a woman who has borne sons to her husband, the presence of love as a distinguishing factor in negotiating marriage, the continuing importance of the family of the husband, the contentions of a sacrificing wife along with the voice of an educated, employed woman. Ironically, each of these may be interpreted in themselves, and in conjunction with other factors, to rationalize the husband’s behavior as much as to substantiate Gurpreet’s claim to her husband’s continued love and support.


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Desertion is a very serious and widespread problem among rural and urban poor women (Datar & Upendra, 1993). Child marriage, illegal second marriage, unfulfilled dowry demands, infertility or birthing several girl children, alcoholism, prolonged or chronic ill health of the woman, adultery and violence have been linked to the problem, which is not confined to any religion or caste, though it is seen to be common among the lower strata of society (Gulati, 1981). Ruksana describes neglect and being sent away, leading to possible desertion, in the following quotation from her narrative: In this phase again and again my mother-in-law pressurized my husband on some pretext or the other to leave me at my brother’s house and often Nadeem took me and left me at my brother’s place. He would forget thereafter to bring me back. I would phone and request him to bring me back only to be told that he was very busy and so he could not come to pick me. After some days of staying at my brother’s place, my brothers would eventually take me and drop me again at my husband’s house. This happened for several months, about eight to nine months. I kept going to my mother’s home and kept being sent back. (Ruksana, 21 years old, married for two years)

The traditional hierarchy of relations between the bride-giving family and the bride-taking family (Chitnis, 2004; Dube, 2001; Madan, 1993) and, more importantly, the nonrecognition of the economic rights of women in their natal families (Kishwar, 1993) or within the marriage (Agnes, 2000), create a tension between the natal and the affinal family. Not only are these women often considered as economic burdens, but they are also commonly abandoned and left to their destiny, even being made homeless to silently bear destitution due to the stigma attached to the concept of desertion. Vanita’s narrative is illustrative: I am ashamed that at this age my husband is having this relationship. My elder son is himself of marriageable age but this has not deterred him. Ever since this has happened he neglects me, comes home rarely and fights with me whenever he comes. He beats me badly. Not that he did not beat me earlier; see there is “larai” (quarrel) between husband and wife in every home. That has no meaning. Even if he beats me, does not talk to me or shouts at me, it is all right; after all, he is my husband. Actually, to tell you the truth, sometimes I am confused. I think my husband still loves me. When I shout and tell him to leave my house and to decide once and for all where he wants to go and with whom he wants to live, he silently listens to me. He does not shout at me or beat me. He keeps coming back to me. He tells me that he loves me; he tells me that in any case he has not married the other woman so why should I worry at all. He tells me that ultimately he will leave her but he will do so slowly, otherwise that woman may create problems. He asks me to understand . . . but he has broken me! (Vanita, 39 years old, married for 20 years)

The importance of marriage in Indian society in determining the social status of women has been emphasized in many sociological writings in a variety of contexts (Chakravarti, 2006; Dube, 2001; Fruzzetti, 1982; Wadley, 1995). Women continue to live in dysfunctional and violent marriages, many simply because they understand that a woman who is unmarried, divorced, widowed, or deserted is looked down upon. In the narrative above, in continuing to live with a husband who is obviously engaged in


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extra-marital relations and in holding that his beating is not really objectionable, Vanita presents an acceptance of a violence of difference as masculine privilege. She is fearful of a disloyal husband’s desertion (even though she has an unsure faith in being legally married to her husband), while the other woman, even when she attracts her husband, does not have her status. Magnitude and impact studies of violence focus on concrete acts of physical violence so as to quantify it, control subjectivity, and arrive at standard and comparable estimates (International Clinical Epidemiologists Network [INCLEN], 1999; International Institute for Population Sciences [IIPS] & ORC Macro, 2000; Jejeebhoy, 1998; Rao, 1998). These studies yield comparable results and provide data for advocacy and intervention. However, in themselves, they may also result in a somewhat simplistic treatment of the complex issue of violence in intimate relations for encouraging a tendency to reduce violence to discrete acts. While listening to women’s stories, I realized that women do not store information along such lines as “How many times did your husband beat you in the last month?” or “Has he ever slapped, kicked or battered you?” Although beating, thrashing, kicking, and other physical attacks, as direct assaults on the body, may be regarded as standard acts that can be objectively treated by scholars as “violence,” it is actually not so to women themselves who may regularly experience these without holding themselves to be victims of violence, or may carry a notion of being violated even while they do not register or narrate any episodes of beating, kicking, or thrashing. These actions themselves carry different meanings for the women in their subjective contexts, depending on what they consider as natural or unnatural male behavior, suited to a husband (Subadra, 1999; Thapan, 2009; Visaria, 2000). Deliberate intentional injury by physical assault forms one of the most accepted definitions of violence in research. Thus, even when we use a rather vague term such as “violence” in reference to homes, what is generally and immediately suggestible are concrete acts of physical assault such as slapping, beating, kicking, hitting, knocking down, and so on, because it is this violence that appears to be concrete and measurable, “not something that is a figment of imagination” (Interviewee). Such acts are verifiable and, by logic, ones for which accountability may be easily laid and punishment given. However, the more pervasive forms of violence in homes reported by women in counseling contexts in my study relate to feelings of being forced, coerced, and harmed not merely in terms of concrete acts of violation as described above, but also through a more complex interplay of emotional, psychological, social, and economic abuse that is subjectively experienced not in any singular episode/episodes, but as a connected part of a transgressive and dissatisfactory continuous relationship. This points to violence as a process, rather than just a set of concrete actions. For an example, let us look at Namita’s story. Namita is 48 years old, married for 18 years to Shinde who is 50 years old, handicapped, employed and earning reasonably well. For both Namita and Shinde, this was their second marriage. Namita contacted the women’s organization because her husband refused to allow her entry into the marital home. She reported that she had faced tremendous physical and mental coercion over many years due to her husband’s stubborn nature and disrespect for her. The last of their frequent quarrels related to her not cooking food according to his liking. The episode escalated to an


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altercation between her brother and her husband, wherein the husband attacked the brother with a knife. Since Namita intervened on her brother’s behalf, her husband became very angry and threw her out of their home. At the time she contacted the family counseling cell, she was living with her brother and wanted to go back to her marital home with the assurance of financial support from Shinde, but Shinde was not ready to take her back or to give her any maintenance. In addition, he threatened Namita with reprisal for going to women’s organizations for help. Shinde, meanwhile, had sent their children to a hostel and had refused to tell Namita about the whereabouts of her children. Namita narrated one long incident in considerable detail to illustrate the kinds of spousal behavior that hurts and pains her and that she finds coercive and abusive. It is the details of a quarrel that happened in recent times that occupies most of Namita’s narration, a quarrel that she had with her husband over cooking poha (a preparation of pounded rice) and she uses it to illustrate how he cannot forgive her small mistakes for which he punishes and tortures her. She says, “In routine matters like cooking, someday food is good, someday small mistakes result in not such good fare. He cannot take this; he gets angry, throws food and does not talk.” While continuing to talk of the day’s events when her husband suddenly walked out of the home, pursued by Namita and the children, she goes on to say, He boarded a train and went into a compartment reserved for the handicapped people. I followed suit. He kicked me out . . . Then late at night I got a phone call from my mother’s neighbor who said that I should hurry and come because my husband was attacking my brother with a knife.

In this extract from Namita’s narrative, two concrete acts of physical violence are mentioned, namely, kicking and attacking the brother with a knife. Yet, when Namita narrates her story, it is not these acts in themselves that are held significant. In her interview, she talks of rejection, ridicule, and threat, and links her mental torture to her husband’s stubbornness and his superiority complex. Throwing food, not talking, and aggression toward her brother and mother that are bound to hurt her social position in the natal family are all violations of an intimate relationship, what has also been called “relationship abuse,” and cannot be simply understood in terms of a narrow range of physical violations. She says, He is very “ziddi” (stubborn) and wants his dictate to be followed to the core. If there is anything that annoys him, he does not talk for days, sometimes months. He forbids me to go to my mother’s place or have my brother visit me, and I must observe all this otherwise he will stop eating. He keeps swearing at me and even beating me.

It is interesting and telling of the nature of relationship violence that a violent husband’s not eating should be a point of concern for the “violated” wife. Food and emotions related to it are also very much cultural expressions of love and violence. Namita’s story in her interview illustrates how violence is embedded in throughout the relationship she experiences with her husband: physical, social, emotional, and economic. She goes on to talk also about their sexual incompatibility and his violent sexuality:


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Violence Against Women XX(X) I have tried to do everything as he wants. He wants sex everyday; I comply even though doing “shareer ke choncle” (rituals of the body), as he wants, I do not like it. I am 50 years old; I myself do not care for a man. But I cannot please him. He often spits on me and calls me bad names . . . when he wants sex and I refuse him, he is very angry, he accuses me of having sex with other men. He says such bad things . . . that the children talk to me and not to him because I may be having sexual relations with my son! It is such rubbish!

Here, too, violence is experienced in a range of behaviors that involve sexual pressure and coercion, and that are explained away as a woman’s duty and a man’s need: as part of an exchange in the relationship she has with her husband, the price she must pay for being the “wife.” The sexual violence Namita experiences is what may be termed marital rape: being beaten and forced into sexual acts she does not want or desire and being sexually denigrated in front of her own children. However, for Namita, this violence is naturalized as differential sexual desire of a man and a woman, especially a woman of her age. Although denial and repression of her own desires is violence, Namita is complicit in inflicting this on herself for fear of the consequences of expressing it. Namita goes on to link the violent sexuality of her husband not to the impact so much on her as to an environment of fear in the house, which not only she but also the children experience as traumatic and restrictive. One night when I said “no” to him because children were still not fast asleep, he kicked me. I cried out and my daughter awoke. My husband shouted in front of my daughter that he will push a wooden rod up my vagina. My daughter was so afraid; she came up and held me tight. She did not leave me, holding me so tight to protect me from her father. She could not sleep. Only when her father slept off, we could sleep.

Apart from these grave incidents of physical, sexual, verbal, and emotional abuse, there are numerous instances of irrational behavior that Namita narrates to show how unjust her husband is in his behavior to her: “This man he even snatches and breaks my mangalsutra” (a black bead necklace women wear for symbolic long life for their husbands). She continues, One day he sent both my children to a boarding school. I appealed to him but he did not relent, he sent them there and he did not give me their address. When I kept on asking, he gave me a wrong address. My children were sent to Sangamnere, but he told me they were in Pune. I took a loan from a friend and went all the way to find my children only to realize that he had fooled me, sending me off in the wrong direction . . . Now, for 2 months, I am with my brother. He has sent the children away and he does not take me back at our home. He says that since I have sided with my brother I should stay with him.

The above extracts from Namita’s narrative show a series of acts of commission and omission, and their interpretations that make for Namita’s experience of being violated. These involve not only more concrete acts of physical violence, sexual coercion and assault, but also violence that is experienced by Namita as neglect, isolation, desertion, economic deprivation, blackmail, and verbal abuse. The context that Namita


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gives, moreover, demonstrates the linkages between these different manifestations of a violent relationship, both in terms of how violence is enacted and how meanings are made of these manifestations by the victim. Fear of violence, and an inability to fully comprehend it, lace Namita’s narratives and those of other women, for even when they attempt to explain violence by contextualizing it and linking it to the facts of the matter, they are at odds to understand “why he does so.” For women who continue to live in abusive relationships, naming and defining the experiences with their husbands and other family members as violence is not a straightforward or simple process. Also, the limited nature of legal and professional definitions effectively obscures women’s own understandings and limit using the term violence to the most cruel, concrete, and physical forms of it. However, even when women are unsure of defining their experiences as violence, they are able to report what may be termed transgressions and assaults, hurts, and pains, physical and mental, to their “personhood.” In themselves, these cases also illustrate how violence in homes is experienced differently from the way one experiences violence from strangers. In “stranger violence,” an isolated episode involving infliction of physical or emotional pain or injury or the threat of such injury is objectionable and open to social intervention. Marital violence when reported is more ambiguous, comes with a history of violent episodes and, even then, it is its painful and traumatic impact that is expressed in sadness, rage, humiliation, or despair, rather than a singular episode of injury or threat of injury (Geetha, 1998; Subadra, 1999; Thapan, 2009; Vindhya, 2005; Visaria, 2000). Marital violence exists side by side with love, and complicates women’s reactions to it for as these cases illustrate, family and familial relations have different and complex meanings for women’s identity as women and as mothers, and women often minimize personal pain and abuse when it comes from intimate relations which they would perhaps not do in cases of stranger violence (Keshwar, 1996; Mitra, 2007; Thapan, 2009). Ambivalence to violence in intimate relations makes women keep quiet about it, until they find they cannot take it anymore.

Who Is Being Violated? The women’s narratives are not referring only to themselves but to a range of relations and relationships that are the subject of violence. Women’s identity is primarily defined through their relations (Chowdhry, 1998; Dube, 2001; Kakar, 1988, 1990), and the narratives included here illustrate that women’s sense of self and violence is deeply informed by how it implicates their relations with others like their children, their parents-in-law, siblings, and friends. The extended family and its many members are drawn into the conflict and into violence between husband and wife, and vice versa. Further, women in the study showed that they are unable to shirk off the cultural codes that define it as their feminine personal responsibility to screen out the violence to these relationships. Women are conscious of the implications and interconnection of the violence they experience with others in the family, and are often silenced due to consideration that their actions may jeopardize the lives of their loved ones, especially


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children and natal relatives. In the process of violence, the many relations that women usually have play an important role in contributing to, or conversely, in protecting women from, violence. Women may express great awareness for these others who are implicated in the web of violent relations. The following excerpts illustrate these various issues: I found courage to speak to my father-in-law about his (her husband’s) lack of (sexual) interest. He told me that he found the topic difficult to talk to his son about and that it would be better if I approached an elder cousin of my husband who would speak to him about the problem. However, when his cousin approached him, my husband was very angry and told him to mind his own business. The cousin offered to help with medical advice to which my husband insultingly taunted him, “Who is she to you that you are so worried whether she is having sex or not?” His cousin withdrew. (Savita, 29 years old, married for 20 months) My mother and my brothers came to my home to talk to my mother-in-law and my husband, but my mother-in-law abused them. I cannot tell my brothers of all that is happening at home. In my mother’s home, there are three elder brothers, two younger sisters and my widow mother. Because of the absence of my father, my eldest brother has to shoulder all the responsibilities. He saved money with great difficulty and got me married. I do not want to trouble my brothers. But my husband hit my brother and swore at my relatives. All this when they have always tried to help me. (Ruksana, 21 years old, married for 2 years) My husband phoned my brother and threatened him that if he comes to see me, he will kill him. Now he does not come to see me. But my father-in-law takes care of me. He loves me and says he will always support me. (Gurpreet, 35 years old, married for 9 years)

The narratives particularly illustrate how complex and contradictory the experience of motherhood is for women experiencing violence. For example: He oppressed me in so many ways. He would come home very late, and then many times he ate up all the food I cooked without leaving a morsel for my children. How can a human being do that? For days together neither the children nor I saw him. Neighbors told me that he was loafing and spending time with other women. It hurts me and my children, but I absorbed all his sins in my stomach. (Shadhana, 26 years old, married for 5 years) He beats me and tears my clothes in public. He takes off his own clothes even before our daughter. He feels me all over right in front of the children; it is very bad. God knows what children think. My elder son started weeping one day seeing all this. He has started keeping away from home and hangs at the restaurant where he works all the time. He does not want to come back. I am afraid [my husband] may touch my daughter some day. I go out to work and she is alone at the house. You see, he does not hesitate to undress in front of his own small daughter. (Shadhana, 26 years old, married for 5 years) My parents do not want me to go back. They say they will get me married to another person. I think that I may get another husband, but my daughter will not get another father. I will have to leave my child with my parents if I marry another man. But they will take care only


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for some time, after that they will get irritated. In any case my parents are not well off . . . And who can ensure that the second husband will be better than this one. (Veena, 27 years old, married for 3 years)

Children give women the strength to fight and survive violence, but they are also used against them to violate and manipulate them. While motherhood in the traditional patriarchal Indian culture is said to confer a powerful status to women (Wadley, 1988), and women aspire to it by begetting sons to continue the patriarchal lineage, motherhood in India demands immense sacrifices and the circumscribing of personal choices for women (Ganesh, 2010; Krishnaraj, 2010; Pandey, 2010). In their narratives, the women in the study link their violence to the failure of their womanhood if they are not able to bear children, if they cannot beget sons, or when they give birth to several daughters. Mother blaming is a psychological tool that is frequently used to control mothers and bind them to abusive relationships. A romantic and idealized view of motherhood often clouds men’s and women’s minds, where a mother is so full of love and selflessness that she must forgive and forget all personal dissatisfactions and assaults to her ego and person, so as not to negatively affect her children’s future and disappoint their need for a stable family. These expectations make mothers bear their oppression silently, so as not to be perceived by themselves, as well as by their children, to have failed in their central role. The women’s narratives show how motherhood constrains their choices, not only in familial relationships, but also at work. Mothers of younger children often report lack of help from others in the family, frequent violence, and ill health, which restricts their work options, making them economically dependent and thereby more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. Nevertheless, while Indian cultural traditions hold that women must observe the responsibilities of motherhood or be condemned in case of non-fulfillment, most women do not have the same rights to their children as men do.

Who Is to Blame? Even though women come to the counseling cells seeking a reprieve from spousal and family violence, they connect violence perpetrated against them with the violence of everyday living that they share with their husbands and family. Since most women coming to counseling cells are from lower income and deprived backgrounds, their narratives are laced with their pain as victims of poverty, disease, drugs and alcoholism, police-related atrocities, criminal backgrounds, and unemployment. In their narratives, the violence of the husband is often linked and explained in the context of these dehumanizing conditions of their lives, and women seek counselors to advise and help them in dealing with the husband’s violence as well as the problems connected to their structurally disadvantaged status. Thus, counselors are implored to help procure jobs for the women complainants or their abusive husbands, to get their children into children’s homes where they can study without expenses, to advise husbands to refrain from alcohol and drugs, to refer the diseased to doctors and charitable hospitals, to talk to the police for consideration in handling their cases, to refer the


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victim’s family to funding organizations for financial assistance, and so on. Violence of the husband is just one of the problems confronting most of these women, and they assess how best to holistically deal with the interconnected nature of their troubles on the family front. Many times, the contradictions in the experiences of the family come not only from the husband’s violent behavior, but also from the violence of others related to the husband, who exercise control and restrict the women by virtue of their role relationships with the husband. Consequently, women are often reluctant to blame their husbands as the chief culprit, and instead complain against their mothers-in law and other affine. In the hierarchical relations of the Indian family, male violence against wives hinges not only on men’s control over women’s bodies, sexuality, mobility, labor, and earnings, but also on the complex set of power relations that confer power on mothers of sons, who may in turn abuse their daughters-in-law. Moreover, familial relationships often naturalize the playing out of a violent masculinity and a violated femininity. Culturally accepted masculine behaviors frequently dictate that men control their wives and, if needed, beat up aggressive or assertive women.5 Housekeeping judged to be inadequate, meals not deemed proper or tasty or not served on time, child care labeled improper or discipline involving beating the children in front of their father, nagging the husband or not letting him be at peace in the house, not attending to the husband’s guests—all are offered as justifiable reasons for wife beating. The behavior of an assertive woman is often interpreted as the husband being a weakling, and both wife and husband attract public censure for not adhering to sexual stereotypes, but frequently men more than women for they attract the ire of mothers and other men for being weak and allowing a woman to take control. Below is a sample of responses given by a variety of different men, interviewed during the research, who rationalized the acts of physical violence on their wives through excuses and justifications, characterizing their violence “normal” and “legitimate”: Where are there houses where nobody beats anybody? Her father must have beaten her . . . mother must have been slapped by the father. She beats my children . . . I beat her to teach her . . . who else will do it? I have this duty. I take care of her. I am responsible for her. . . .Why I cannot beat her? What should I do when she does not listen to what I say? I have always explained to her that, though it is true that I beat you, but I do so as to teach you. Do not ever do what I tell you not to. I love her. I am also emotional . . . Those men who get angry are also very emotional. She should respect my emotions. She does not cooperate in sex. I am not a demon. If she is unwell, it is alright . . . but she never cooperates with me.


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I have a dominating personality. I like people to listen to me. I am the eldest born. Even at workplace I get angry if people do not obey me. She should understand my nature is like that. She speaks to every stranger about our family and she tells false stories about me. She has caused me so much humiliation in public. She deserves it [the beating]. She understands nothing. Her mother has taught her nothing. What will I do? What should I do? I am a man. My mother was a nurse . . . I am myself not any third class man. I am a responsible man doing a good job. Should I leave my work and manage the home and children? She has a big mouth. She does not adjust with my mother . . . How to maintain peace in the house? She hides things about my own children from me. She hid children’s marks in the terminal exams and ultimately my child failed. She tells my children to lie to me. What else would I do? Anybody else would have thrown her out!

These statements by men as to why they beat their wives are telling. Some appeal to a loss of control due to their nature, or due to frustration on account of the wife’s lack of responsibility. Finding fault with women for not cooking properly, for not being good-enough mothers, for being sexually unresponsive, or for being offensive to relatives are all forms of victim blaming by which men simultaneously seek control over their wives and maintain their self-righteousness. Since these excuses are based on socially approved rationalizations for violence, in counseling sessions we have an interesting situation where, even though men and women narrate their versions of the conflict that led to the violence, men do not feel compelled to deny that they were violent. The counseling context and narratives demonstrate that there is a basic difference in the manner in which men and women understand marital violence. Men tend to use force against their women as an aspect of their manhood that derives from a complex sense of their familial, economic, and social roles, responsibilities, and status. They carry an image of themselves as men and as husbands, and it is not easy for them to accept the force they use on their women as violence for it is hidden, embedded in the language of managing, controlling, loving, possessing, protecting, and desiring their women and families (Geetha, 1998). Instead, the responsibility for violence is shifted to women and their inadequacies. Home is hailed as a woman’s responsibility, and it is her failure to keep it in peace and order that is said to warrant strict behavior from men. Women often carry similar notions of propriety and wear the guilt of being unsuccessful women. This is of course due to a naturalization of the dominant norms of masculinity and femininity. Not only does much of the violence that women experience get disguised in the reigning operations of these definitions of masculinity and femininity, but the fact that families provide a base for protection from external violence also makes it that much more difficult to see, and to subvert familial violence. Families do provide women


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with their closest, most tender, and supportive relations and, in addressing their need for love, create ambivalence in women’s feelings. These contrasts and contradictions in women’s experiences in the family need to be understood, so as to explain why women are unable to extricate themselves from the responsibility of violence. Families are about love and violence, and this conception of a normal family predominates within Indian cultures, and in the minds of men and women. Also, families provide a continuation of other aspects of society in terms of the inequality, subordination, and exploitation that is structured into familial relationships for women. Women who experience violence in their family, therefore, explain it to themselves as the natural and normal “order of inequality,” unless the discrimination and violence they experience cross substantially the boundaries of culturally defined notions of normality. The cost otherwise is women’s sense of failure to fulfill their gendered responsibility for keeping a family strong, healthy and unfragmented. It is from this background that we need to understand the significance of the most common solution sought by women in the counseling cells studied, namely, reconciliation and readjustment in the family through advising the husband and his relatives. This also sheds light on understanding how women construct themselves sometimes as victims, and at other times, as survivors. Much of feminist writing in India still constructs women as victims, despite the narratives demonstrating discontinuities and ambivalence.6 Schechter (1982), Scutt (1983), Stanko (1985), and others have pointed out how the victim approach may be strategically and politically useful. It is understandable as well how it may be a powerful tool to enable women to live a life of dignity, despite the violence in their lives. However, the term “victim” is inadequate to fully represent the realities of women who experience violence. First, the term “victim” is somehow taken to connote physical violence of extreme or visible form, thus making for a social recognition of domestic violence victims as the women who have outward signs of physical violence. By implication, this furthers the invisibility of violence against women that is not of this very outwardly evident kind. Second, most women who experience violence as a routine part of their lives do not like to be seen as victims, for this negative identity distinguishes them from women who are regarded as having normal relationships. This is so because the term victim carries a negative connotation of being passive and without agency, and women, while they may play up this part of their identities at times when they seek sympathy and intervention, do not like the connotation when they ground their identity in terms of the struggles they have successfully undertaken to live their womanhood and their motherhood roles. Third, the fact that in many Indian extended family setups, the important role played by women as mothers-in-law and sisters-in-law in perpetuating violence on women as daughters-inlaw problematizes the simplistic projection of women as victims of male violence and demonstrates how women can themselves be perpetrators of violence. It is important therefore to recognize in our discourse on marital violence against women that women can occupy different roles—that of victims, survivors, and also perpetrators—and it is somewhat simplistic to elevate the role of a victim to that of women’s general identity (Ferraro, 1996). One of the interesting revelations to me


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while sitting in the counseling cells has been that the cases have tremendous scope for understanding the nonlinear and multifaceted nature of human psyches. Women themselves alternate in their projection of their identities as victims, survivors, and even perpetrators of violence. This is a matter of both their consciousness and their strategic choice. Women, while narrating their marital problems and the misdeeds of their husbands and their relatives, would at times laugh at their own whims, talk of their spirit to take revenge, explain their underhanded dealings, their use of feminine wiles, deceit or untruthfulness. They would reveal the “weapons of the weak” and implore the listener to understand how they do all that for reasons of a loving heart, for the defense of a hapless child who needs protection from the father, for a friend for whom they must lie to their own husband, or for compulsions of satisfying multiple responsibilities that, irrespective of the husband’s anger and violence, must be fulfilled as a social role. Thus, to speak of women as merely victims in effect robs them of this human agency and consciousness of responsibility that dictates the many roles they play with respect to others in the homes. Moreover, when we normally see people live in a situation of conflict and survival, we talk of their courage and their sheer determination against all odds; we praise their spirit for survival against these odds. However, it is ironic that when it comes to women and their experience of everyday violence, we forget to see it beyond the pathos and victimhood, as a courageous and heroic adaptation to life’s difficulties (Pearson, 1986). Moreover, the fact of the courage and the adaptation of women dealing with violence holds true, whether women continue to live in violence or, by opposing it, end it. In a singular focus on women as victims, we simplify and forget that human psyches are more varied and more complex. This is the reason we wonder why women continue to live in violent relationships, even when sociocultural support may provide them with violence-free alternatives. Given this background, it is a matter of perspective whether women’s continuation in violent relationships through personal sacrifices is necessary and constructive, or unnecessary and destructive. Perspectives on whether women are victims, survivors, or perpetrators are varied, not only in terms of both patriarchal and feminist definitions, but also in terms of which developmental stage of consciousness a woman or a man has attained at a particular time in her/his individual life journey. Since I conducted interviews with women in successive meetings, I came to hear from them the many versions of their stories—some in which they were the sad, cheated heroines; in others, the sacrificing, loving ones; and in others, where they constructed themselves as clever, revengeful, or successful in dealing with their husbands’ foolishness and insecurities. The point that I want to make is that women do not hold themselves as “mere” victims of violence, nor do they define their men solely as “batterers,” “exploiters,” and “oppressors.” To do so ourselves, as social workers or academics, is to tell only half the story. To tell the full story we need to acknowledge the centrality of relations and “connectedness” in women’s lives. This comes out repeatedly in women’s stories as in the narratives above. We also need to acknowledge the centrality of coercive power and “ownership” in men’s relations with women, and that violence is often built on this intersection of difference.


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Conclusion To conclude, the narratives reveal that to understand violence against women in homes (in both Indian and other contexts), we need to focus on the processes and their context-specific meanings, including the relationship between verbal, psychological, and physical aggression and their interpretation by the abused. These processes show the need to understand women’s stories, keeping in mind the silences and taboos on discussing private matters of such sensitivity and confidentiality, the emotional struggles that women undergo to breach these boundaries of privacy and confidentiality, their sense of themselves and their responsibility as women, and always keeping in mind the cultural and social contexts and the nonlinear manner in which they speak of their individual biography. Since violence often continues over a long period in relationships that are private, the meanings of acts of violence for the victims are to be seen in the deep impact that violence has on women’s lives, and those of the children who witness it. Emotional isolation is one of the very frequently reported impacts on women. Since women in India (as elsewhere) frequently remain silent about the violence and abuse they experience, sometimes on a daily basis, because of shame, embarrassment, fear, and guilt, they often experience loneliness and isolation that lead to their losing a sense of self and dignity. Women report that they start disconnecting from the world around them or withdrawing from friends and relatives. Losing confidence in oneself and one’s decisions, negative self-esteem, and an over-dependence on assertive and aggressive husbands, so much so that this includes making extra attempts to get a husband’s approval and attention, are some important impacts of violence reported by women in their stories. It needs to be recognized that this violence should not be regarded as necessarily less harmful or less grievous in its impact than physical violence. Many of the women interviewed in this research talked of the effect of emotional and psychological violence being more profound than that of physical abuse, which one forgets with the healing of the injury and pain. The complex emotions expressed in terms of anger, rage, sadness, loss, grief, fear, terror, self-blame, shame, lack of trust, lack of sleep, suicide attempts, and other self-harming behaviors all spoke of persistent pain that outlasted the actual physical injury. Women activists in India have been successful to some extent in raising the public profile and legal recognition and response to the problem of domestic violence. Yet, the issue is still seen, in large measure, as a mutual conflict between husband and wife or a relationship problem that is unduly escalated through intervention by women activists. In India, this can lead to large-scale rhetoric on the need for preserving the family from the onslaught of Western individualism and ideas of women’s liberation. Associated with this rhetoric is the social expectation that women must take individual and personal responsibility to keep the family together. Thus, any discourse on domestic violence aimed at the public at large, both in India and elsewhere, needs to tackle the difficult and complex inter-linkages between the twin concepts of “domestic” and “violence,” and the thin line between the private and the public. The issue relates to


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understanding this locale of violence, wherein violence is not so simply an “all or nothing” experience as it is most often depicted to be. Rather, it is a process that involves changing subjectivities of men and women as victim and victimizer, where violence is closely interconnected with many other positive and negative emotions that define dynamic human relations and consciousness. Further, it is experienced in the context of the need to love and have love reciprocated, the need for togetherness, reassurance and security, and fears about these, and above all, the need to forgive and be forgiven. Given the specific locale of marital violence and the high cultural value given to family in India, we need to rethink and reflect on how we may best address it, so as to be able to comprehensively deal with this pervasive violation of women’s human rights in places assumed to be safe, without in the process violating men’s and women’s sentiments attached to the idea of home as a sacred place and marriage as a relation of many lives (Agnes, 2000).7 Only then can there be a more widespread and “real” recognition of marital violence as a serious family and social problem. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes 1. Das and Nandy (1985) point to “the problem of violence in terms of the structure of ideas within which it is perceived and represented.” They find the behavioristic and taxonomic approaches inadequate as most cultures validate regulated use of violence. According to them, elaborate structures of representation, silence, and breakdown of signification are aspects of the philosophical doubt in which all violence is rooted. My contention is that family being a sacred institution in Indian society, violence is legitimated and remains hidden in definitions of love, duty, hierarchies of consanguine-affinal relations, respect for age difference and gender hierarchies. 2. Violence in homes as an interrelated phenomenon with widespread violence in society is a recurrent theme in Indian writings. Agarwal (1988) writes, “The tensions and contradictions associated with the growth of religious, ethnic, clan and caste divides, of urbanization and modernization, and of regional, class and social inequalities, are all increasingly being played out not only in the arena of politics and propaganda but directly and violently in the streets and in the home” (p. 20). Kannabiran and Menon (2007) write, “The interlocking or dovetailing of public and private patriarchies means that women experience linked or connected forms of violence that extend from the home to the street and on to the battlefield” (p. 23). 3. See Geetha (1998) who reflexively looks at violence from two perspectives, as one who, as a woman, shares poignancy of this existence with women complainants, and another as being a part of a support group called Snedhidi wherein she is privileged with respect to her education, class, and caste. There is, in one context, the shared notions of discrimination, harassment, and hurt, and in another, the possibility to help a woman “make the story . . . to


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4. 5.

6.

7.

Violence Against Women XX(X) render tales of hurt coherent . . . (negotiate) those structures and contexts which surround and exercise their command over women’s lives” (p. 305). She wonders if violence is an uneven experience that affects different women in different ways, or an essential aspect of a problematic masculinity. This paper is drawn from chapters of my unpublished thesis titled, “Marital violence: A feminist understanding of violence in intimate relations.” See, for example, Chowdhry (1994, pp. 275-283), where she discusses in detail some of the local sayings that depict the accepted view regarding the relations of dominance and subservience between men and their wives. In this context, see Karlekar (1998, p. 1749), who is critical of the “stereotypification and monolithic discourse” on domestic violence in India. Also see Chopra (2003, p. 1651), who advocates for the need to re-look at the relation of men to violence, to “locate men through a series of subjective, agentic positions, as perpetrators, victims, witnesses and narrators of violence.” See, for example, Agnes (2000). She comments on how legal scholars and academics in India continue to be skeptical about the introduction of a notion of women’s rights to property as it is feared it may be a Western influence that will reduce the sacred institution of marriage to a financial transaction, devoid of the pious ideals. Most religions in the Indian setting view marriage as a kind of spiritual bonding, and ignore the fact that women and children find themselves trapped within this complex socioeconomic system, even when it is violent and dysfunctional.

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Author Biography Nishi Mitra is an associate professor of the Centre for Women’s Studies at a premier social science institute in India, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. She has been involved in several national and international studies of violence against women. She has published a pioneering report on domestic violence intervention in India, titled, Domestic Violence as a Public Issue: A Review of Responses, and has been involved in teaching, research, and police training programs on the issue of violence against women. In recent years, she has been involved in formulating and launching one of the few Women’s Studies MA programs in India. Presently, she is engaged in teaching several courses in this new Women’s Studies MA program, developed in partnership with universities in the United Kingdom under the Delphe Project reported in this special issue.


A cycle of violence? Examining family-of-origin violence, attitudes, and intimate partner violence perpetration.

Previous experience of family violence and intimate partner violence in pregnancy.

Lesbian intimate partner violence.

Intimate Partner Violence in Young Adulthood: Narratives of Persistence and Desistance.

Women's perspectives on the context of violence and role of police in their intimate partner violence arrest experiences.

Intimate partner violence interventions.

Intimate partner violence and maternal educational practice.

Effects of child abuse, adolescent violence, peer approval and pro-violence attitudes on intimate partner violence in adulthood.

Gender, psychopathy factors, and intimate partner violence.

Intimate partner violence and HIV: embracing complexity.

Informal social control and intimate partner violence.

Intimate partner violence and mental health.

Intimate partner violence and children's memory.

Intimate partner violence victims as mothers: their messages and strategies for communicating with children to break the cycle of violence.

Interparental Violence: Similarities and Discrepancies Between Narratives of Mothers and Their Children.

Prevalence and characteristics of sexual violence, stalking, and intimate partner violence victimization--national intimate partner and sexual violence survey, United States, 2011.

Family violence: impact on children.

The Relationship Between Family-of-Origin Violence, Hostility, and Intimate Partner Violence in Men Arrested for Domestic Violence: Testing a Mediational Model.

Family Violence and Children's Behavior Problems: Independent Contributions of Intimate Partner and Child-Directed Physical Aggression.

Identifying unique and shared risk factors for physical intimate partner violence and clinically-significant physical intimate partner violence.

Mechanisms of Alcohol-Facilitated Intimate Partner Violence.

Multi-day recurrences of intimate partner violence and alcohol intake across dynamic patterns of violence.

Addressing intimate partner violence and sexual violence among adolescents: emerging evidence of effectiveness.

Dyadic violence and readiness to change among male intimate partner violence offenders.