Shalu Nigam

 Excerpts from my book Women and Domestic Violence Law in India: A Quest for Justice , 2019, Routledge p. 54 Anti-arrack movements and alcohol ban protests have been held at various places where the agitating wives continuously have drawn attention to links between wife beating and their husbands’ drinking habits and that drunk men as husbands are vile and deviant who destroy the ‘sanctity of the family’. However, the discourse on domestic violence could not demonstrate the fact that these men are ‘incompetent’ to rule within their homes. Similarly, greedy men and their families who were burning brides or abandoning women to remarry to recollect dowry from other women could not be held accountable for their rapacious criminal acts. Rather, the authority of violent husbands could neither be questioned nor they were held accountable; instead, gruesome reports of wife battering have been suppressed under the garb of ‘protection’ and ‘privacy’. Domestic violence is not visualized as a ‘law

  We, the Women Warriors, are Unstoppable! November 27, 2019 https://16daysblogathon.blog/2019/11/27/we-the-women-warriors-are-unstoppable/ After a long wait, the  National Crime Record Bureau of India  has recently published its report pertaining to crimes in India  in 2017. According to this report, 104,551 cases have been filed under  section 498A IPC , a criminal law dealing with `cruelty’ against married women by their husbands and in-laws. A further 7,466 cases have been registered under  section 304B , which pertains to dowry deaths, while 10,189 cases have been registered under the  Dowry Prohibition Act ,  a law that bans the giving and taking of dowry. In addition, 5,282 cases have been registered for abetment of suicide among women and 616 cases have been registered under the  Protection of Women Against Domestic Violence Act ,  for breaching the civil orders granted under this law in favor of the victims of domestic violence. The  NCRB  report further indicates that the con

  Seven dimensions of powerlessness in an inegalitarian marital relationship  Domestic violence is basically centered on three key elements: violence, domesticity, and structural inequality, where domesticity contextualizes both spatial location and the relationship between the abused and the victim, and structural inequalities work through the paradigm of power and control.  However, in a patriarchal society, what I construe is that domestic violence is distinguished from all other forms of violence against women because of the ‘ seven dimensions of powerlessness in the relationship’ . This is in consonance with the Saptapadi or saat phere, or seven steps around the sacred fire, with saat vachan ,, or seven promises, taken in every step when a marriage is performed as per Hindu rites and ceremonies, yet it underscores the serious abuse women face in marriage.  Briefly, these seven dimensions of powerlessness in marital relations are: First, domestic violence takes place within the co