Peg :The Fortnight from 25Th November to 10Th December Has Been Declared International
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NO SAFE PLACE
VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
by Shoma A. Chatterji
On November 25, 1960, the three Mirabel sisters, Patria, Maria Teresa and Minerva, were murdered by the Trujillo dictatorship.They were killed because despite repeated imprisonments, they persistently opposed the regime of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo of the Dominican Republic who was overthrown a year later. This date is now a historical commemoration of violence against women in international terms. This has now extended into a fortnight of processions, street demonstrations, street plays, seminars protesting violence against women. Though as Indians we see this violence within our own cultural parameters, violence is global. The women’s movement notwithstanding.
A two-and-a-half-year-old girl balances on a pole, performing for Arab tourists in Mumbai. Rural Rajasthani women with their elaborate garments work on the IndiraGandhiCanal, against the arid backdrop of the Thar desert. A woman lies in a Tamil Nadu hospital, covered with a sheet. Next to her, in a steel container, lies an aborted female foetus. In another hospital in the same state, an abandoned newborn girl lies alone in a hospital bed, in a stark, poorly lit room, with a midwife beside her. These are some of the over hundred images of Indian women presented in a stunning photographic exhibition in three cities of the USA, exploring the question - what has Independence meant for women? Violence formed a part of this show. Though the concept of an international exhibition on Indian women sounds fine, it somehow has the tendency to focus on violence against women being perhaps, culture-specific to Third World countries in general and to Asian cultures to be specific. This, however, is a travesty of the truth.
Whether we choose to concentrate on violence against women in our own culture, or in another culture, violence is always cross-cultural. It has to be cross-cultural because of the heterogenous reality of life in today’s post-modern times. “This reality is not a mere crossing from one borderline to the other or that is not merely double, but a reality that involves the crossing of an indeterminate number of borderlines, one that remains multiple in its hyphenation” writes Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Distinguished Professor in Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Violence against women wears many faces. Women face violence from men. Women are victims of social and familial violence. They face economic violence at home and at work. They are in constant fear of being sexually violated at home (incest and marital rape), on the streets (molestation, eve-teasing, flashing, rape, gang-rape and murder), at the workplace (sexual harassment.) They fear violence from other women. There is the perennial suspense of State violence being inflicted on women such as the many Islamic states, which treat women in- humanly. And last, but never the least, over thousands of years, women have been consistently brainwashed to unflinchingly, blindly inflict violence on themselves under the false sense of their ‘duty’ towards their family, their children, their religion. They also inflict violence on themselves from a false sense of ‘guilt’ for being women. Under the false idea that by inflicting violence on themselves, they will be able to ‘wash and purify’ the guilt committed by others.
In Britain there are few studies of the extent of violence against women. But one analysis of over 30,000 police records shows that 25% of all violent crime is wife-assault. Another survey of 1000 women found that one in 6 had been raped, one in three sexually assaulted and one in five had been raped or sexually assaulted as a child. In the United States, a study of 900 women found that 44% had experienced one attempted or completed rape and 20% had been assaulted during marriage. A retrospective study of 170 cases of murdered women in Bangladesh in 1983-85 revealed that 50% of the murders occurred within the family. Attacks directed at the stomach and genitals of pregnant women causing miscarriage or a ruptured spleen are not uncommon. In Chile, 80% women are victims of violence in their own homes. More than four million women in the USA are severely assaulted by their husbands or boyfriends every year. A woman is battered every 18 seconds, 4000 women die each year from domestic violence and more than half a million report being raped or sexually assaulted in the USA.
More than six months after the Zimbabwe Supreme Court shocked equal rights campaigners world-wide by relegating African women to the status of ‘junior males’ within the family, many Zimbabweans are beginning to worry about the current regime’s impact on women’s reproductive and other rights. Recently, an all-male panel of judges ruled against 58-year old seamstress Venia Magaya who had sought justice after a half-brother evicted her from their dead father’s property that she had inherited. Her sex went against her as the judges ruled that African women who marry under the customary law leave their original families behind. Therefore, they cannot inherit. According to Rudo Gaidzanwa, professor of Sociology at the University of Zimbabwe, the decision is part of an economic and political retreat into right-wing, chaotic and destructive behaviour. Meanwhile, the constitutions of several African countries including Ethiopia, Ghana and Uganda have added specific provisions banning discriminations based on customary law. This is a living example of drastic economic and legal violence inflicted on an entire womanfolk by the judicial and legal machinery of a country.
No Safe Place, a documentary jointly produced by Mary Dickson and Colleen Casto and directed by Dickson, offers a thoughtful examination of the origins of violence against women, looking at the biological, sociological, cultural and historical factors involved. The programme includes interviews with feminist writer Gloria Steinem and Patricia Ireland, director of the National Organisation of Women who show how violence against women has been allowed and accepted throughout history. They argue that violence against women can be traced to a 2000-year-old culture that encourages male domination. Biological sociologists like Michael Ghighlieri, on the other hand, argue that testosterone acts as a kick-starter for male aggression, and that violence is universal from species to species and culture to culture as a “male strategy.” Jane Caputi, professor of American Studies at FloridaAtlanticUniversity and author of The Age of Sex Crimes, explores the media’s role in perpetuating violence against women by portraying it as normal.
Television commercials have broken a generations-old taboo and have got South African women talking about rape, a crime believed to be committed in the country at the rate of one in every 20 seconds. Rape crisis centres in S.A. estimate that nine-lakh women and six lakh children are raped every year, but do not report it. As many as 17,000 women are murdered in the course of sexual assault. “We are talking about more deaths than in a war like Kosovo” says Jane Raphael, a magazine editor. She has set in motion a mediawide initiative to get people to talk about rape. Advertisements asking people to report a rape have led to an increase in calls to rape crisis centres. Even men have called to admit that they have been responsible for what they now realise amounted to rape!
Body-Blow, a collection of three plays written by three women, Manjula Padmanabhan (Lights Out), Dina Mehta (Getting Away with Murder) and Poile Sengupta (Mangalam), all exploring the question of violence, both articulated and subtle, was published recently by Seagull Books, Calcutta. In a well-researched foreword to this book, feminist writer C.S.Lakshmi offers numerous examples of violence against women from family folklore.Both by men and by women on themselves . She cites the story of a wild woman from the Tirunelveli area of the Telugu region who could not be controlled. “A handsome and valorous man controlled her by hooking her nose and dragging her along. Later she wore the hook by which she was controlled, as a piece of jewellery” (Rajnarayan,1976:p.31). Lakshmi says that that a nose-hook can become a piece of jewellery is probably the ultimate acceptance of attack as deliverance, of punishment as kindness, of invasion of one’s body as an outcome of the guilt of being a woman.
Often, women inflict violence on other women and on themselves. All this, however, is both directly and indirectly, the result of patriarchal conditioning. Dowry harassment and dowry deaths are indulged in generously by mothers-in-law who are women themselves. Female foeticide in Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu are reportedly initiated and indulged in by elderly female members of the family. Asian and African societies have conditioned women to inflict violence on themselves through practices whitewashed as religious or social rituals necessary to the very definition of being a complete woman. The practice of female circumcision among several African communities is a case in point. Fasting without a drop of water on certain auspicious days, for the welfare of the husband and children means remaining deprived of the basic necessity of existence -- food. Ranjana Kumari, director, Centre for Social Research, says “female sexuality has always been seen as a threat to male-dominated society. But a woman’s sexuality is controlled by several rituals and regulations.” The physical destruction of a widow’s beauty by having her shave off her hair, which she herself sometimes wilfully complies with, is a part of this patriarchal conspiracy. When her husband dies she is forced to change her entire lifestyle, her food habits, her dress, her body language. Curbs are placed on her geographical and social mobility. As if she is guilty of living when she has no moral right to live! When she ought to be dead! Says Kumari, “the idea is to strip her of any sexual sense of a self.” Girls and women committing suicide for being born ‘girls’, for getting pregnant out of wedlock, for dowry harassment, for being raped, are all inflicting violence on themselves either as an escape route from further social and filial violence, or as a language of protest against a society that violates them just because they are women.
Sita’s two trials by fire are our own examples of violence inflicted by Sita on herself. Savitri’s long and arduous journey into heaven to bring her dead husband Satyavan back to life could be construed as needless voluntary violence inflicted on herself. Behula is forced to dance in Indra’s court, which amounts a public humiliation of her body and her sexuality at the court of God to bring back to life her husband Lakhinder, who died of snake-bite by some curse. Gandhari’s lifelong blindfold after marriage to Dhritarashtra arose perhaps, because she felt ‘guilty’ to be the ‘sighted’ wife of a genetically blind husband. She did not wish to be ‘more equal’ than him.
Modernisation, industrialisation, technological advance and the educational and economic liberation of women have not made the slightest dent in this self-inflicted violence of women. Only, the manifestations are different. So different, that most women, who indulge in these acts of violence, actually believe that this is a part of their own ‘liberated’ selves. Women in sex-cloistered societies such as nunneries and certain Islamic communities are either conditioned or forced to wear the robe, the veil and the burqua. Never mind that this suffocates their persons, restricts movement and space and generally keeps them in a perpetual state of physical discomfort. Playwright-cartoonist Manjula Padmanabhan says that the modern woman wearing tons of make-up as a token of sophistication is no less uncomfortable and insecure than her veiled counterpart. The difference between makeup and a veil is that one exists to enhance the facial features of a woman while the other exists to hide them. “But both have the effect of masking the wearer’s face and both, in different ways, can cause acute discomfort.” (Padmanabhan, Rediff-On-The-NET, Nov.11,1999.) The endless pursuit of plasticised beauty by modern women is, in essence, nothing short of torture inflicted on a woman’s body, either by herself, or by others. The question of ‘choice’ in this case, is neatly undercut by the fact that beautifying one’s face and body is basically the consequence of patriarchy’s notions of beauty being the qualifying factor for being a woman per se. For being, becoming and remaining a complete woman, a feminine woman and a graceful woman. Finally, a desirable woman. This is the result of thousands of years of forcing the pill of ‘beauty’ down women’s gullible throats. The rushing into starvation diets to retain that trim figure through gyms, aerobics and at times, extremely tiring workouts, and thereby, depriving themselves of food just like their predecessors who fasted for the welfare of the family, is also violence, albeit of a highly politicised kind. The race against time and age with age-defying complexes annointing the face and the body is only another way of punishing oneself for growing old naturally.
Writes C.S.Lakshmi, “The notion of controlling the female body, shaping, reforming and rerouting its work, movement and space is a constant and persistent one. It is so deeply ingrained that certain forms of violence, such as beating, are considered a natural part of a woman’s life.” Ironically, by the same logic, cosmetic enhancements, remedies and corrections of a woman’s face and figure at beauty parlours and gyms, are symptomatic of a woman’s surrendering to the same violence she is seemingly fighting against. Because of our gender, we must constantly think about how to be safe. Fear proscribes how and where we live, where we walk, where we park, where we sleep, what we wear, how we look, eat and travel. As women, we know there are some things we cannot - or rather, should not - do, some places we should not go to. We have seen films, we have read articles, and we know the statistics. The media is our collective storyteller and the story it tells us over and over again is that there is no safe place - not on the roads where we drive, on the streets where we walk, not even in the house where we live. We feel at risk because we are.
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