India’s electoral process presents a dichotomy. Six hundred and forty-two million voters, more than half of whom were female, cast a vote in the largest democratic process in action in the world. Yet, in a country where 90 rapes are reported everyday, very few among the 2,823 candidates who stood for elections, had women’s safety on their electoral agenda. For those that did, all were sporadic and none tackled the underlying institutional violence that millions of survivors live through everyday.
This dichotomy is real: nearly 50% women face domestic violence and two out of three Dalit women face sexual violence in their lifetimes. Yet, not just political parties ignored this. Even voters did not seem to demand it.
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Prolonged and worse
Gender-based violence is incorrectly presumed to be one specific act of violence, often by an intimate partner at the household level, that politicians cannot address. However, in a white paper developed through 200-plus hours of interviews and discussions with lived experts, we found that the institutional violence on survivors is often prolonged and worse than the specific act of gender-based violence itself. This is where voters and politicians can make a vital difference.
Institutional violence against survivors starts even before the reporting process, influencing their decision to come forward. For example, a report published in 2019 by J-PAL, a global policy think tank, showed that 39% of officers in India think that complaints of gender-based violence are usually baseless. With a brutal police system, a decades-long traumatic judicial system and no hope of justice, a vicious cycle of violence is maintained.
Women only seek justice when their circumstances become unbearable. Despite one in two women facing intimate partner violence, India has one of the lowest divorce rates in the world at 1%. A report estimated that 77% of women in India remain silent, even to their closest relatives, about the violence they endure.
“A woman once approached us with bleeding veins,” said Ranjita, Founder of Samarthya, a Denotified Nomadic Tribal youth and women-led organisation. “We accompanied her to the police station to file a complaint, and the cops told us to step aside so they could talk to her alone. They tried to dissuade her from filing the report and sent us around to different police stations. When she still wanted to report, they accused us of coercing her… Now, they tell us that since she comes from the neighbouring State of Karnataka, this case is out of their jurisdiction. These are the challenges we face with the justice system.”
Problems in rural India
In rural India, male and upper-caste dominated panchayats add an additional set of barriers for women to seek justice. Divorce is almost never an option: India has a backlog of 40 million court cases and this particularly impacts survivors of gender-based violence, even more so survivors from marginalised communities with pre-existing systemic inequities due to their caste, literacy and geography.
“Getting justice in India can lead to a lot of injustice,” says Ranjita.
We, as a country, have lost hope. This is where bureaucrats and elected leaders can come in and make a difference by creating survivor-centric institutions.
For years, social impact organisations have been taking up this responsibility to train police and members of the judicial system to adopt a trauma-informed lens. For example, Vanangna, a women-led organisation in Bundelkhand trains government officials, including the police and law enforcement, on women-centric and survivor-centric processes. We need to adopt these learnings at a national level, and we need the wisdom of survivors of violence, especially those from historically marginalised communities, to help us design and validate a just system.
Strong laws, weak implementation
India has strong domestic violence laws, yet, implementation has been a colossal failure due to inept officials and archaic processes. This is unsurprising because the officials come from the very society that has condoned violence. We need a national reimagination and improvisation of our justice institutions by leveraging the learnings of organisations such as Vanangna, to make them trauma-informed and focused on healing.
We also need more data and more stories to be shared publicly. For decades, institutional violence has been amplified by a lack of data. It is impossible to truly understand how often and how many women are being denied access to justice.
Granted, the recent updates to criminal law procedures heavily focus on timeliness and ease of access through digital means. However, this needs to be accompanied by gender-sensitive training and monitoring and evaluation measures to ensure staff have a trauma-informed approach when working with survivors of violence.
Voters and politicians have the power to shine a light on the issue and make a massive difference. For example, with the widespread government campaign to promote education of girls, we have seen a massive national shift in enrolment of girls in school.
For such a shift to happen in the small and large institutions of our country where survivors of violence no longer fear the repercussions of accessing justice, we, as voters, must demand our rights.
Our women deserve safety and dignity.
We must fight for it.
Mathangi Swaminathan is the founder of Parity Lab, a first-of-its-kind feminist accelerator for survivor-led-organisations fighting against gender-based violence. She is an Echoing Green Fellow, an Acumen India Fellow, a World Economic Forum Global Shaper, and an alumna of the Harvard Kennedy School
