A Woman, A Widow, and A Witch

If

• you're a woman
• and a widow
• and belong to a lower caste

you could be

• stripped
• garlanded with shoes
• paraded through the village streets naked
• and accused of being a witch

should you attempt to enter a temple.

timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Cities/Widow_paraded_naked_for_entering_temple/rssarticleshow/2927206.cms

There's much to be said about the abuse of people from low castes. There's just much to be said about discrimination against women in general and widows in particular. But I'm not going to say it here. I'm going to focus on the fact that, in this case, this one woman was, of all things, accused of being a witch.

It happens. Say something you're not supposed to say. Stand up for yourself. In an urban setting, you'll probably be called either a slut or a ball-breaking bitch but chances are, you won't be called a witch.

The rationale behind the reactions in urban and rural settings is very similar though -- to denigrate what you cannot control hoping, in the back of your mind, that the self-confidence and assertiveness in the woman will disintegrate. And at the very least, if that doesn't happen, that you'll scare other women enough not to have them act similarly.

Witch-hunting is still prevalent in various parts of the world including some Indian states such as Assam, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. Between 1991 and 2000, over 522 cases of witch-hunting were registered in Bihar alone.

What's frightening though is that nowadays, being branded a witch is often just a device for people to do such things as settle property disputes and ensure that women do not stand up for their political and other rights. That seems to have been what's happened in this case: a woman who's three times as vulnerable because of not only being a woman but also a widow and a member of a lower caste was targetted when she entered a Kali temple in Dhanbad.

The persecution of so-called witches is sometimes due to Shamans who encourage such acts and due genuine ignorance and superstition while at other times, as I suspect is the case here, it's due to the need for a covert and 'socially acceptable' means of keeping women from asserting their rights.

It ranks among the most ignored crimes against women in Indian society today but many social activists say that legislation alone is unlikely to do much to help solve the problem unless there is a change in the attitudes of the people. And until attitudes do change, India will continue to have the dubious distinction of being, as someone once put it, 'a Nuclear Power engulfed in a Black Magic frenzy'.

References:
In the name of the witch : frontlineonnet.com/fl1723/17230870.htm
I've also quoted from an article I wrote ages ago here.

Damini

I’ve got a film called ‘Damini’ playing on the TV next to me. I read a review of the film and have absolutely no desire to watch it although I suspect I’m going to watch it anyway. The basic story seems to be:

• poor village girl named Damini marries rich urban man
• taunted by her mother-in-law, she makes friends with the maid
• the maid is raped by her brother-in-law and three others in her marital home
• Damini initially unwittingly helps to cover-up the incident
• she later fights for justice for the maid
• while doing this, her in-laws buy everyone in the system who can be bought, she herself is declared mentally unstable and the maid is killed
• she somehow escapes from a mental institution in which she has been dumped because of being supposedly mentally unstable and goes on to continue fighting for justice with the help of a lawyer who’s given up on justice
• she ultimately succeeds primarily because her husband has a change of heart and supports her

Apart from the fact that it’s a little too easy for the story to have been true for me to have any desire watch it, I can’t help but wonder if — as inappropriate as this is to say — it’d have been smarter not to fight for justice. Damini would not have had to go through all that she did go through and, even more importantly, I can’t help but suspect that if there was no such fight, the maid would not have been killed (since she seems to have been killed primarily to ensure that the rapist’s family’s ‘honour’ was not denigrated).
The film ends very neatly with the criminals getting their just deserts but that hasn’t stopped me from wondering if there are times (in real life) when it’s a good idea to cut one’s losses and leave vengeance to God?

Personal Safety for Survivors of Rape

Excerpts from a post by Marcella Chester at abyss2hope:

“[S]ome rape survivors unfortunately become repeat rape victims with different perpetrators. …. This is more than random bad luck. …. The trauma of rape can leave victims disoriented and defenseless.

…. My safety is a higher priority than some man’s hurt feelings. Any man who demands that I put his feelings above my safety is only reinforcing my reasons to distrust him. ….

Reliable allies don’t undermine a survivor’s hyper vigilance or ask to be exempted from those viewed with less trust than before a rape. ….

Because of the trauma rape victims have experienced and the muddiness that can come from that trauma many rape victims may question their perceptions. Their rapists have a clear motivation for trying to distort reality and they have the benefit of not being traumatized. ….

[A]fter my first rape … [s]everal men told me flat out that they wouldn’t touch me even if was consenting as long as I was jail bait. Some men didn’t have this level of ethical behavior and took my passivity which came with ineffective coping mechanisms as permission to use my body. …. Also I had learned that rape didn’t hurt as much if I didn’t try to fight it.

During my teenage years there was only one guy who required enthusiastic consent and verification with a clear opportunity for me to safely change my mind. Now I won’t settle for anyone less respectful or less ethical. ….

It is the vulnerability due to trauma which brings out so many predators. …. Because the rape survivor may still be lost in the trauma which follows rape, alcohol and overt violence may not be needed.

Quietly raping a sober survivor who barely knows which way is up is real violence."

Read the whole post: abyss2hope.blogspot.com/2008/03/advice-for-rape-survivors-personal.html (It’s worth it: these excerpts constitute only about 1/8th of the original.)

Surviving rape is difficult. Surviving it a second time around can be devastating not just because of the rape in itself but because it can make the victim wonder, on one hand, if there is something inherently wrong with her to cause her to have been raped, if she provoked the attack in some way, if she was to blame.
And on the other hand, the fact that the second rape may not have been as violent as the first because of her being relatively passive possibly due to being too disoriented or too frightened to fight back could, in a culture which treats only violent rape as rape, quite easily cause her to begin to question whether she’s making a mountain out of a molehill, whether she has been raped at all.

Why Does She Stay?

The Navhind Times [1] reported that a man named Motiar was sentenced to just eight months in jail for attempting to murder his wife, Tumpa Bibi, ostensibly because she pleaded that he be let off and the court believed that there existed the possibility of their living a happy life together. He had set her on fire and left her with 36% burns just 28 days into their marriage according to the paper.
Personally, I think that every time a woman decides to stay with an abusive man, it’s an example of hope triumphing over experience (though not in the sense Dr. Johnson meant it). In one of the books in the Princess series, Jean Sasson and her anonymous collaborator had said something to the effect of: Once a dog’s let you see its tail crooked, don’t expect it to straighten it out because it won’t. I couldn’t agree more.
In an article by Evan Stark called ‘The Entrapment Enigma‘ [2] in the OUP USA blog, the author said:

“The psychiatric establishment in the 1970s believed women brought abuse on themselves because they were “masculine,” “frigid,” “overemotional” with “weakened ties to reality,” or had “inappropriate sexual expression.” But by the late 1980s, the “myth of masochism” and other transparent accounts that blamed the “wife-beater’s wife” for her abuse had been widely discredited, in no small part because of the work of feminist mental health professionals . Empirical work by psychologists and social workers had demonstrated that battered women had a better sense of reality than their assailants and, compared to nonbattered women, were actually more “social,” more “sympathetic,” less “masculine” though not necessarily more feminine, exhibited greater ego strength, and employed a greater range of strategies to change their situation than nonbattered women in distressed relationships.”

The question which has remained, however, is why battered woman stay in an abusive relationships. In her book ‘Trauma and Recovery’, Judith Lewis Herman wrote, “Prolonged, repeated trauma, by contrast, occurs only in circumstances of captivity. When the victim is free to escape, she will not be abused a second time; repeated trauma occurs only when the victim is a prisoner, unable to flee, and under the control of the perpetrator.”
Being unable to flee, to use the author’s words, I suspect, is a result of four factors:
1. Practical Difficulties
such as being financially dependant on the abuser and having nowhere to live
2. Social Conditioning
such as believing that a woman’s value as an individual is derived from her ability to ‘keep’ a man which is reinforced by living in a societies where women will be looked down on for supposedly failing to do so
3. Personal Beliefs such as those where a woman is unable to believe that she is worthy of being treated with either respect or kindness as a result of having had her self-esteem torn to shreds by being abused
4. Institutional Responses
such as finding it difficult to convince police to file charges against the perpetrator, not having access to shelters, knowing that courts are unlikely to convict the perpetrator.
Knowing that women may have reasons (which seem entirely sensible) for staying in abusive situations though doesn’t stop me from feeling ill every time I hear about a woman who has actually done so.

Links:
[1] http://www.navhindtimes.com/articles.php?Story_ID=031755
[2] http://blog.oup.com/2007/06/violence/

Trafficking and Prostitution

This post focusses on the EU.

1 Direct trafficking

The expansion of the European Union and the opportunity to make money due to an ostensibly insatiable demand are factors which have contributed to up to 120000 women and children being annually trafficked into Western European countries from Central and Eastern European countries.
Most women victims are aged between 18 and 25, and have been abducted or deceived (by being promised ‘normal’ jobs) in Western Europe. They are usually sexually exploited and suffer from severe physical and psychological trauma which may continue long after the exploitation itself has ended. The European Union has been more active in developing penal legislation, law enforcement and judicial co-operation than in the preventing trafficking and protecting victims although it has supported NGOs and health and social services to assist victims to recover and resume a normal life. [1]

2 Indirect trafficking

In 2003, immigration contributed to more than 80% of the total population growth in the EU-15. The effective integration of immigrants, many of whom are financially dependant and therefore particularly vulnerable to abuse, in both the labour market and society has become a channel to reach the Lisbon targets. However, ‘the gender perspective is to a large extent lacking in integration policies, which hampers the possibilities to fully utilise the potential of immigrant women in the labour market’.[2]

3 The links between trafficking and domestic violence

Women who have entered a society alien to them are especially vulnerable to being subjected to exploitation and violence since they often do not know their rights and even if they do, they may not know how to protect themselves.
Mass migrations due to poverty, pauperisation and prejudice ensure that rootlessness, ethnic tensions and violent lawlessness are a feature of nearly every city of the developed democratic world, [3] and one of the manifestations of this phenomenon is that those who are violent at home now have access to a market of both women who are illegally trafficked and women who migrate to Western European countries in search of a husband.
Moreover, women who migrate to marry ‘threaten’ the local women, particularly those who are already married, because their husbands may divorce them in favour of (younger) migrants thus depriving them of their pensions and leaving them in poverty after decades of marriage.
Recommendations have been made to protect local women in such situations by increasing stamp duty to make divorce proceedings prohibitively expensive, ensuring that matrimonial property is divided equally between the husband and his first wife, considering housework as labour in the case of housewives and making provisions to entitle housewives to a salary and pension from the state for their work in the home.

4 Efforts to beat trafficking

In line with the principle of subsidiarity and as signatories of the Beijing Platform for Action, it is Member States’ responsibility to take measures to fight trafficking although the European Commission has undertaken initiatives to help them fulfil their obligations. The Commission was, for example, responsible for implementing STOP (1996-2000) and STOP II (2001-2002) which were conducted to exchange information, and to reinforce networks and practical co-operation between Member States in order to encourage and facilitate action to prevent and combat trade in human beings and the sexual exploitation of children (including child pornography). STOP had a budget of €6.5 million and co-financed 85 projects in its five-year implementation period and STOP II, which was initiated to ensure continued support to the programme, had funds €4 million at its disposal for its two-year implementation period.[4]
Furthermore, both human rights law and (the the majority position in) refugee law now acknowledge state responsibility for human rights violations such as family violence which has become one of the most visible (and prolific) emerging bodies of refugee case law.[5]

References:
[1] Trafficking in Women; The misery behind the fantasy: from poverty to sex slavery
[2] Framework Strategy on Gender Equality 2001-2005
(The European Commission)
[3] Reflections on Violence
(John Keane, Oxford, 1996)
[4] STOP
[5] Refugee Law, Gender, and the Human Rights Paradigm
(Deborah E. Anker, Harvard Human Rights Journal, Volume 15 Spring 2002)

This post is an extract from an essay was written for the POROS Project.