Theorising Domestic Abuse In India

Introduction 

Shazia Choudhry's work analyses gender, human rights and violence against women examining these areas through interdisciplinary and feminist lenses. During this talk, Choudhry and her team continue this vital work through research into victims' realities of domestic abuse in India. Working in three Indian states – Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal – the study comprises detailed empirical analysis conducted by a multi-disciplinary team, including lawyers and geographers. The research team's study analyses the realities of legal protection two decades after the introduction of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (PWDVA 2005). The study asks: What challenges do women victim-survivors still face in accessing support, security, and justice? It also seeks to understand how victim-survivors cope in everyday life, with or without the law. The research team conducted qualitative interviews in each state with survivors, local stakeholders (including lawyers, medical practitioners, NGO workers, police and protection officers), and community members.

The Study 

Choudhry first sets out what, in theory, legal reform set out to do. The PWDVA 2005 was ostensibly progressive, encompassing an expansive understanding of the domestic relationship to include family members living together as a joint family (section 2(f)), a change only recently made in the UK (Section 2, Domestic Abuse Act 2021). Choudhry convincingly argues that the law leaves plenty to be desired in its failure to address the needs of minoritised sexualities and its absence of acknowledgement of the unique needs of disabled people. While, in theory, the law does not promise enough, its fulfilment delivered even less in practice. The study highlights that legal reform has been insufficiently funded and resourced on the ground to make a real difference to women victim-survivors. Just 23 trials were completed under the PWDVA in 2021.

The research team's interviews evidence societal understandings of gendered, marital abuse as normal and accepted, with women more likely than men to agree that violence was justified in specified circumstances. These societal norms are reflected in the study's empirical findings, showing that over three-quarters (77%) of women have never sought any help, nor told anyone about the violence they had experienced. The PWDVA 2005 had intended to address these low levels of help-seeking; however, as in other areas, it failed miserably.

Key Findings

The ‘Violent Domestic’

Choudhry conceptualises the perpetrator in the majority of cases as the 'violent domestic', principally husbands whom the study found were often influenced by violent pornography. This intersectional lens illuminates a problem that is not categorised by any one of class, caste, or geographical space, contrasting with common conceptions of DV as being more common among lower-class, rural populations.

Survival Work

The complete lack of the implementation of the PWDVA 2005 led to women victim-survivors engaging in what Choudhry labels 'survival work'. Women developed their own context-specific coping strategies in situations where the state omitted to support and protect them or put them in even greater danger. Choudhry thoughtfully explains women's strategies as tolerance, silence, and the capacity to adjust, accept, and acquiesce to their situations and surroundings. Choudhry believes silence is a powerful concept, encapsulating how women "become small".

These strategies, she argues, contribute to women's capacity to seek justice where formal justice systems have failed to provide it. Women seek justice through community, faith, and quasi-legal institutions. In relation to criminology, Choudhry's criticism of community-centred approaches to justice is critical. She recalls survivors' ‘overwhelmingly bad’ experiences with 'Panchayats' - village elders whose mediation attempts typically replicate and reproduce societal hierarchies of power, and who viewed the sustenance of the family model as vital, encouraging women to remain with their abusive partners to embody archaic norms. As a criminology student, these findings provide evidence against support for community-centred approaches to dealing with domestic abuse, realising the dangers inherent in this form of justice as argued in works by Clare McGlynn.

Theorising Injustices as Patriarchal

Choudhry creatively theorises justice as a ‘mythical creature’, with all possible paths to justice forestalled by ‘ineffective, inefficient, inaccessible and inequitable aspects of the informal and formal justice mechanisms’. By appreciating the role of patriarchy as a 'general account of an unjust social system', Choudhry believes we can begin to understand the common factor preventing women victim-survivors from accessing any real form of justice in India. She adopts Dembroff's broad, macro-level view of the essential ideology undercutting injustices against women victim-survivors. She firmly argues that patriarchy, a concept much-forgotten in legal, criminological, and sociological theorising of domestic abuse, is that essential ideology. Choudhry argues that the demands on women to constantly adjust, acquiesce, and tolerate illuminate the power of patriarchal norms. Women are not supposed to find justice when they seek it; they are supposed to put up with violence.

Despite Choudhry's criticism levelled at formal and informal justice systems within the three Indian states of Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal, she remains confident that the law is a normative force which sends messages of what society should and should not tolerate. Due to the reproduction of patriarchal norms evidenced by community-led, restorative justice processes, Choudhry advocates for remedies which place the moral responsibility of the act not on the victim but on the offender and the state, emphasising the urgent need for change in our societal norms and legal frameworks.

Post by: Andrew Lika, current MSc student at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford