Violence Against Women in India: A General Ov...

Violence Against Women in India: A General Overview

Author Name : Saddam Hossain

INTRODUCTION

The 1993 United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, refers to violence against women as ‘any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life’ (UNGA, 1993, Art. 1). Bandana Purkayastha, Mangala Subramaniam, Manisha Desai and Sunita Bose in their paper “The Study of Gender in India: A Partial Review” observes that feminist literature defined violence against women as any form of coercion, power, or control including physical, sexual, verbal, and mental abuse perpetrated against a woman by her intimate partner or his extended kin. Violence against women constitutes a range of violence including mental and physical abuse of women, rape, marital rape, date rape, sexual assault, honour killing, molestation, sex-selective feticide or female infanticide and numerous other forms of violence and discriminations whether overtly or not in their everyday lives. Thus, violence against women includes a wide-ranging form and type of violence that may be both physical and mental and span from what Rohit Bhatt calls from “womb to tomb”. Statistics show that violence against women is on the rise, the 2015-2016 National Family Health Survey data shows that 31.1% of the ever-married Indian women aged between 15 and 49 years experienced spousal violence and significantly almost 4% of women experienced some form of violence during any pregnancy (International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) and ICF 2017). Violence against women has also increased during the covid-19 pandemic. It is estimated that between January-May 2021, over 2,300 complaints related to domestic violence were filed with the National Commission for Women. While it was from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh that most complaints were received, Delhi however recorded the highest complaint rate. The NFHS-5 data also observes that over 70% of women from the major states, though were subjected to some form of physical violence never informed about it (Domestic Violence Complaints received in past 5 years reach a 21 year high, Hindu 21 June, 2021.