Keynote address at Sneha

I would like to begin by thanking Sneha for organizing this event, for inviting me as a speaker and for taking the initiative to help their sisters in Conneticut. Sneha has begun on a long journey but a noble one. They have made the road by walking. Sneha is the oldest South Asian women’s organization in the United States begun in 1993. The first step is always the hardest and Sneha has already taken it. The next will only require more time and more commitment.  I can see that all of you are prepared to do both. I would like to shake hands with all of you for doing this. 

 

I too began working on issues of violence against women very recently – only eight years ago. I used to be a journalist and very often on the trail of murder, hunger, war and famine. At every instance, I saw that women were especially discriminated against or targets of abuse. If I researched murder, I would find that a man’s murder was taken more seriously than dowry deaths and honor killings by the judicial system. If I looked at famine, I found that more girls would go to bed hungry than boys. In times of conflict women were the special targets of abuse: rape has become a weapon of war. And in times of joblessness, girls were sold into prostitution to feed boy children. 

 

These were public situations and easy to study and object to. What was harder was to pinpoint the culture of violence against women, which made all of the above possible and even acceptable. What was going on in our daily lives? At home? All around us? Violence in the home from an intimate partner. Why?

 

The situation today is that one in three women in the world has been abused physically at least once in her life time. And most often at home which is supposed to be a sanctuary. I am going to speak on Domestic Violence. Domestic Violence is the most insidious and pervasive from of violence. It is invisible, under reported and under documented.

 

Women and girls undergo violence from birth to death, from sex-selective abortion, to dowry-burnings to sati ( a widow being burnt on her funeral pyre)  to simply being thrown out of the house when they are widowed or too old to work.

 

 

The hardest is the violence they face at home. I am sure most members in Sneha know that women and children are often in greatest danger in places where they are safest- in their families. Home becomes a place of terror and violence and most often from people women trust. Those victimized suffer both physically and psychologically. They are unable to voice their opinion, speak up, make their own decisions or even protect themselves or their children for fear of further repercussions. Their human rights are denied to them and their lives are stolen from them due to the ever-threatening presence of violence.

 

And very often, they cannot turn to the state for protection. Policy makers and law enforcers often do not look at violence against women as violence. Because of this, human rights violations against women and girls have for too long been denied the attention and concern of international organizations, national governments and traditional human rights groups and the press. And so, millions of women allover the world continues to endure debilitating and often fatal human rights abuses. In India a ten-year old girl is rescued by a flight attendant who notices her crying. Her father sold her to a 60-year old Saudi Arabian man for USD 260. Two months ago, a thirteen year old is raped on a local train in Bombay as five people watch. A journalist present writes a story in The Times of India the next day.  In Kenya 300 boys attacked a girls dormitory. 71 girls were raped. 19 were trampled to death in the stampeded to escape. The school’s principal said: “the boys never wanted any harm to the girls. They just wanted to rape.” In Brazil, a man who confesses to murdering his wife and her lover is acquitted for the 2nd time by an all-male jury. The acquittal is based on the fact that he acted to defend his wronged honor. In Ireland, a 14-year-old raped by her father’s best friend, tested pregnant. She is prohibited from traveling to England where abortion is legal. Only when she threatens to commit suicide does the Supreme Court allow her to proceed. In the United States, a 51-year old woman is stabbed 19 times by her former boyfriend and killed as she waits inside a courthouse for an order to extend her protection. Twice before he was charged for harassment and both times the charges were dropped.

These are only a few instances of abuses which occur every day. The above cases were documented by Equality Now, a human rights organization in New York.  Human rights violations against women need to be documented publicized and stopped. We need to begin now. Therefore, again, a hearty congratulations to Sneha, for this initiative.

 

I personally have had two transformative experiences which have impacted deeply and got me so deeply engaged in issues of violence against women. I have been a journalist for 14 years and then I worked in the UN for the last five years. Now I head an organization called Apne Aap based in New York and Bombay to end sex-trafficking. I have worked in Thailand, Nepal, India, UK, Kosovo and the US. Ten years ago I was walking the hills of Nepal researching a story on how villagers manage their natural resources when I stumbled upon rows of villages which did not have any girls from age 15-45. I asked where the women and girls were. I was given sheepish smiles, giggles and sometimes the answer, “Don’t you know they are in Bombay?” I was intrigued and I asked why and how? I then found that modern day slavery still exists. The trafficking of women had been institutionalized. There was the local procurer in the village, who would take a girl or girls to the towns of Nepal and sell them to agents who would take the girls to the border of India and Nepal. Here after payoffs to the local police, the girls would be smuggled across to India and sold to another set of middlemen. These middlemen would rape, beat and subjugate the girls in small boarding houses along the border and then put them in trains and take them to the red-light areas of India. There the girls would be sold for USD 20-40. Virgins and younger girls fetched a higher price. 

And then these seven -13 year olds were kept locked up in small rooms and raped by ten-15 men a night. 

I was appalled, outraged. I had never seen these levels of exploitation before. As a woman and a human being, I decided to do something about it. Hence, Apne Aap.

 

The other transformative experience I had was in the December of 1992. I was the victim of political violence. I was covering the demolition of the Babri Masjid by the BJP as a reporter and I was physically attacked and thrown into a ditch. I went to the political leader in charge of all operations there and asked for his help. I was told that what I had experienced was trivial compared to the historic moment of the demolition of the Mosque. When I returned to New Delhi, I spoke up about it: to the press, to commissions of inquiry and national TV.  I discovered that the moment I spoke up publicly about this assault to me, I had crossed some invisible line of being a “good” woman.  I should have kept quiet about the physical attack. Good women do not speak about violence done to their bodies. And I had done so on national TV.  I thought about this and wondered why the shame and guilt were mine rather than the perpetrators of the violence. Because, in India, women live within the Lakhsman Rekha (the line drawn by the Indian god, Rama to keep his wife Sita in their jungle cottage when he went hunting. She crossed the line and was kidnapped.) Sita therefore was held responsible for her own kidnapping. I too had crossed this invisible line by speaking up about the violence done to me. 

Even when Indian women migrate thousands of miles, they know about this Lakshaman Rekha. Isolated in their homes, in the US, away from their family networks, they are scared to speak up about the violence they face. They do not want to cross this Lakshman Rekha.

 

We are taught shame and guilt from the time we are born. We feel guilty that we are born women and taught to be ashamed of our own bodies. How often have we been told that there is only a certain way we should sit, talk and laugh? Only a certain way we should dress. Good girls are passive, bad girls are aggressive. We were never taught to speak up; we were told timidity and docility were a virtue; that there was no need to compete. And so when we speak, our voices for lack of training, come out shrill. When we compete, we feel guilty. We decide to drop out of top positions in jobs or look for non-competitive jobs. And this only increases our dependency on the men in our lives- fathers, brothers, husbands, boyfriends. When we are abused physically or psychologically we do not speak up- for fear, shame, guilt, dependency, security or simply the lack of ability to speak. 

 

I learnt to speak and speak some more, because my parents taught me to say No to oppression, violence and discrimination. They also taught my brother to learn the social skills necessary to respect women, not put them on a pedestal, and treat them like flesh and blood creatures and with equality. Even so I have found it hard to speak up in public spaces.  But my conviction helps me overcome my shyness. I have been working on issues of sex-trafficking and it is a very lonely journey. But my conviction keeps me going. I am sure you at Sneha also have the strength of your conviction to keep you going. 

To come back to domestic violence. The term domestic means violence from an intimate partner or by a family member wherever it takes place and in whatever form.

In recent years there has been a greater consensus to deal with this violence. International Instruments like the Convention to Eliminate Discrimination against Women passed 20 years ago, the Beijing Platform for Action and Convention on the Rights of the Child have been ratified by most countries and have become standards to curb domestic violence. But progress has been slow because attitudes are deeply entrenched and to some extend effective strategies to curb domestic violence are still being defined, As a result women continue to suffer with estimates varying from 20-50 % from country to country on the rates of domestic violence. The appalling toll will not be eased till governments and civil society organizations come together to tackle this. Women and children have a right to state protection even within the confines of the family home. Violence against women is perpetrated when the state, judicial systems and law enforcement do not treat domestic violence as a crime. So far only 44 countries have adopted specific legislation to address domestic violence.

Violence against women is the manifestation of historically unequal power relations between men and women which has led to domination and discrimination against women by men and has led to the prevention of the full advancement of women.

Violence against women is a global epidemic that kills, tortures and maims- physically, psychologically, sexually and economically. This violence is present in every country- cutting across boundaries, class, culture, age, education, income and ethnicity. Very often the violence is prescribed under the garb of cultural practices or through the misrepresentation of religious tenets. 

And when the violence takes place within the home, it is passively condoned under the garb of tacit silence by family members, the state and the law enforcement machinery. No country is free of this violence though patterns and trends may vary. Specific groups of women are more vulnerable, during armed conflict, women in institutions and detention, women with disabilities, female children and elderly women. At least one-third of all the women in the world have experienced violence at the hands of an intimate partner.

 

The United Nations Declaration to Eliminate Violence against Women defines violence against women as “any act of gender based violence that results in or is likely to result in physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion, or arbitrary deprivation of liberty in public or private life.”

 

The violence is a crucial mechanism by which women are forced into subordinate positions to men.

 

Acts of omission can also be defined as violence against women and girls- such as deprivation of nutrition and education to girls and women. The violence is often a cycle of abuse that manifests itself repeatedly throughout a woman’s lives. At the beginning of her life, a girl may be the target of sex-selective abortion, or infanticide in cultures where son- preference is prevalent. During childhood, violence against girls may include enforced malnutrition, lack of access to medical care and education, incest, female genital mutilation, early marriage, forced prostitution or bonded labor. Some go on to suffer throughout their adult lives- battered, raped and even murdered by intimate partners. Other crimes of violence against women include forced pregnancy, enforced abortion or sterilization and harmful traditional practices like dowry-related violence, sati (the burning of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre) and killings in the name of honor. And in later life, widows and the elderly also experience violence from neglect to bullying to physical abuse.

 

While the impact of physical abuse may be more evident than psychological scarring, repeated humiliations and insults, forced isolation, constant threats of violence and injury and denial of economic resources, are more subtle and insidious forms of violence. The intangible nature of psychological abuse makes it harder to define and report leaving the women in a situation where she is made to feel mentally destabilized and powerless.

Physical, sexual and psychological abuse sometimes with fatal outcomes is compared to torture in both its nature and severity. It can be perpetrated intentionally as a form of punishment, intimidation and control of the women’s identity and behavior. It takes place in a situation where a woman may seem free to leave but is held prisoner by fear of further violence or by lack of family, legal or community support. 

And that is why, domestic violence is a crime that is under-recorded and under reported. When women file a report or seek help, they may have to seek police help or assistance from health officials who have not been trained to respond properly or keep records consistently. On the other hand, shame, fear of reprisal or lack of confidence in or fear of the legal system or legal costs make it difficult for women to report abuse. In most cases physical abuse is accompanied by psychological abuse. 

 

And in many cases sexual abuse is not even considered a crime. In most cases women do not consider forced sex as rape if they are co-habiting with the perpetrator. The assumption is that once a woman is married, the husband has unlimited sexual access to his wife. About 15-20 per cent women report forced sex with a husband. Some countries have begun to legislate against marital rape. These include Australia, Austria, Barbados, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark Ecuador, France, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, Namibia, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Trinidad and Tobago, UK and the United States. India is missing from the list. It is however, very difficult for a woman to press charges because of the evidential rules concerning the crime.

 

Psychological abuse is harder to quantify and therefore even harder to provide a full picture of. Emotional torture and living under terror, is often more unbearable than living under physical brutality. Mental stress leads to a high level of suicides and suicide attempts. A close relationship between domestic violence is suicide is established. Suicides are 12 times more likely by a woman who has been abused than by a woman who has not been. In the United States about 30 per cent battered women attempt suicides. In the US at least 28 per cent women interviewed reported at least one incident of physical abuse from an intimate partner. In India up to 45 % of married men interviewed acknowledged abusing their wives.

 

Femicide the murder of a woman by her batterers is another category to be considered when looking at domestic violence. American women are twice as likely as their western European counterparts to be victims of femicide.

And then incest. Sexual abuse of adolescents within the family is one of the most invisible forms of violence. Because the crime is perpetrated most often by a father, grandfather, uncle, older brother, or another male relative in a position of trust, the rights of the child are often sacrificed to protect the name of the family and that of the adult perpetrator. Studies have shown that 40-60 % of the abuse within families is against girls of age 15 or less. Girls are fare more likely to be victims of incest than boys. Girls in many countries are likely to get less nutrition than boys and may end up with physical and mental disabilities.

Frightening is now the number of women and girls that are being sold into prostitution. Destitute families unable to support their children often sell or hire out their daughters for prostitution. It is interesting that daughters become the first resource in poverty. About 700,000 women are being trafficked into prostitution every year. Of these 50,000 are trafficked into the US alone.

In societies where a higher value is placed on sons, the discrimination against girls lead to so much neglect that it is the primary cause of sickness and death of girls from age two-to five. An estimated sixty million women are simply missing because of this. In other words, another sixty million women would be alive if not for this discrimination.

 

And then there are cultural and traditional practices which lead to harmful abuse of women. Female genital mutilation. About 130 million women have undergone FGM and about 2 million undergo it every year in 28 countries in Africa. It can lead to death, infertility and long-term psychological trauma. 

In India, dowry related deaths are still common. Even though India has banned dowry, more than 5,000 women are killed annually in dowry-related deaths in accidental kitchen fires. 

Acid attacks are another phenomenon on the rise in South Asia. Men throw acid on the faces of young women to mutilate them forever, when their sexual advances are rejected. In Bangladesh there are 200 acid attacks a year. And then there is killing in the name of honor. In Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan, women are killed to uphold the honor of the family. Any reason from alleged adultery, premarital sex, rape, falling in love is enough to justify this. In 1997, more than 300 women were killed in honor crimes in Pakistan.

 

Early marriage with or without the consent of the girl is violence against women as it undermines a girls autonomy and has health consequences for her. She may end up dying at the time of delivering a baby as her body is not fully formed. It leads to teenage pregnancy and could also lead to HIV/AIDS, and of course affects her educational opportunities.

 

While there is no one factor responsible for the VAW, it is obviously an outcome of historically unequal power relations between women and men. The family institution is where these power relations are introduced. These are based on fear and control over female sexuality, belief in the inherent superiority of men, legislative and cultural sanctions that have traditionally denied women an independent economic and social status and inheritance laws.

Lack of economic resources underpins a women’s vulnerability to violence. The threat and fear of violence keeps women from seeking jobs and on the other hand because of economic dependence women have no power to escape from an abusive relationship. The reverse is true sometimes when women’s increased economic activity poses a threat to jobless men who take out their anger by abusing women. The rise in violence in many countries is linked to economic transitions in the country- increased unemployment, poverty, polarization etc

 

Cultural ideologies sometimes encourage or sanction Vaw. In some religions the physical punishment of women is sanctioned under the notion of entitlement and ownership of women. Male control of family wealth and sometimes of women as part of the family’s property adds to this sense of entitlement. The concept of ownership allows control over a women’s sexuality which in many patriarchal law codes is connected to laws of inheritance. Traditional norms therefore allow the killing of a rebel sister, daughter or wife if she indulges in forbidden sex. By the same logic, the honor of a rival group or country is violated by defiling its women. Hence rape has become a weapon of war.

 

Experiences during childhood, such as being witness to domestic violence traumatizes children for life.  They may learn that violence is a method of resolving conflict or asserting manhood. Violence increases when women are isolated. Access to family and social networks decreases a woman’s chances of being victims of violence.

Excessive alcohol consumption often becomes an excuse to indulge in violence. But remember there is no excuse for violence.

 

But perhaps the most important reason for Vaw is the denial of human rights to women and girls. International human rights instruments such as the Universal declaration, CEDAW ( 1979) and CRC affirm the fundamental human rights of all  including women an girls. These instruments stretch beyond economic and political rights to core issues of survival and health that affect the daily lives of women and girls. The strengths of these treaties rest on an international consensus and that the assumption that all practices that harms women and girls violate their human rights. These have led to a growing understanding that no country can achieve its full potential as long as over half their populations - which are women and girls-, cannot explore their full potentials.

By hampering the full participation of women in all spheres of life countries erode half their human capital. True indicators of a country’s commitment to gender equality lies in the laws they have to eliminate violence against women.

Sexual assaults and rape can lead to unwanted pregnancies or HIV/ AIDS.  It can force girls to indulge in risky sexual behavior as adults. Women in violent situations are less able to negotiate contraception or safe sex and end up with unwanted pregnancies or fatal diseases. The mental health consequences are far reaching. Battered women have post traumatic stress syndrome, panic attacks depression, sleeping disorder, eating disturbances, elevated blood pressure, alcoholism, drug abuse, and then finally there seems to be no escape from a violent relationship other than suicide.

 

So what do we do about it? Because our lives and our dignity are at stake, we have to fight back. And we do. Women have become the most significant agents of change in the struggle against gender based violence. While women’s organizations have played a critical role, the collective strength and individual courage of women has been notable in the struggle against violence. Poor and often illiterate these women have been able to mobilize hundreds of other women, raised resources, designed strategies and forced policy makers to change laws and policies. A systematic effort has been made to listen to survivors of violence. Women need to be further empowered through education, inheritance laws, gender sensitive immigration laws, literacy, more job opportunities and stronger women’s’ networks. 

Sneha told me that they began as a Listening post. What a beautiful and feminine way to begin. Women listen and then mend. So more power to Sneha. As we said in Beijing: Women Hold up Half the Sky.

 

 

Speech by Ruchira Gupta, President Apne Aap on Saturday, 14th September, 2002 at a fundraiser for SNEHA, a statewide network of South Asian Women in Conneticut.

Sneha