Introduction
Domestic violence is identified as a major contributor to the global burden and leading cause of violence towards women leading to psychological trauma and depression, injuries, sexually transmitted diseases, suicide, and murder. Women are general are not safe in the outside world, not even in their workplace the anxiety of being the next headlines of a gruesome attack’s victim always looms in their head but incase of domestic violence they really do not get the scope to ponder about the outside world as the brutality comes from with the four walls of their own dwelling. This research paper focuses on this topic that is domestic violence and is conducted to find out the prevalence of different types of domestic violence against women and factors associated with it.
The phenomenon of violence against women within the family in India is complex and deeply embedded. Women are subject to violence not only from husbands but also from members of both the natal and the marital home. Girls and women in India are usually less privileged than boys in terms of their position in the family and society and in terms of access to material resources. Marriage continues to be regarded as essential for a girl; control over a woman’s sexuality and its safe transfer into the hands of husbands who are assumed to “own” their wives is of primary importance. Systematic discrimination and neglect toward female children is evident in a declining sex ratio of 929 women to 1000 males (1991 census). Nevertheless, there are regional and community variations. Women in the north have relatively less autonomy than their counterparts in the south, and experience fewer opportunities for control over economic resources. A small segment of urban upper class women enjoy some of the benefits of education, careers, and economic independence.
Despite regional differences in women’s status, there is much less variation in rates of domestic violence. Overall, domestic violence is prevalent in all settings, regions, and religious groups. Although there are some differences in reporting by region—women in the south report fewer beatings than their counterparts in the north—in-depth qualitative studies have found considerable under-reporting in the data (Rao 1997). For example, it appears that only the most severely beaten women consider their problem worthy of mentioning in an interview or survey; others accept forms of beating and abuse as commonplace and do not report them. Research into the determining factors underlying the existence of domestic violence remains meager but points repeatedly to a lack of women’s autonomy as key. Spousal disparity in educational attainment level or marital age, lack of autonomy within the home, dowry pressure, childhood abuse, unemployment, alcoholism, and poverty are all linked to high rates of domestic violence in India.
The existence of dowry and the role it plays in the abuse of women adds an additional complexity to domestic violence in India. Many studies of assault of wives in India point to the significance of dowry in reinforcing the role of woman as property and in determining the power dynamics between families and women. In particular, wives are abused by both husbands and in-laws over dissatisfaction with dowry payments, and a high level of cruelty against women is socially ignored. Despite the Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961, research indicates there was a 169.7 percent increase in dowry-related deaths from the year 1987 to 1991 as well as a 37.5 percent increase in acts of cruelty by husband and relatives during this same period (National Crimes Record Bureau 1995).
Although reporting of dowry-related abuse has grown, it remains underreported due to fear of social stigma and women’s lack of confidence that recourse is stated in National Crimes Record Bureau. Violence within the martial home continues to be a complex problem that has to be comprehensively addressed if women are to realize their rights. This research therefore lays emphasis on the increasing violence on women in their own domestic framework and throws light on the factors leading to it with the help of graphs and statistics.
Objective
Domestic violence against females is common across culture, religion, class and ethnicity. There are various reasons for domestic violence and it might have serious health outcomes. Various gender roles, stereotypes, and heterosexism along with the economic downturn shaped domestic violence affecting the family unit and community at large and along with this it is equally necessary to understand the role of genetics and environment, in it, if any. The factors like Socio-economic Conditions, Standard of Education, Age, Standard of Living and environment are a huge contributor to it.
It is a hard choice to select a particular community for the research as Domestic Violence is not an age-oriented issue but rather an offence that has been happening from the very age a Girl or Women gets married and starts to live at her matrimonial home. The age of marriage in the rural region is different to that of urban region and regardless of the factor of age; Domestic Violence has been taking place from the very ancient times. So, here we typically want to and will try to cover the community that would help me bring highlight to the main problem of Domestic Violence in the society from the aspect of both Urban and Rural Culture.
Therefore in this paper a research has been conducted through relying on the data provided by National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) on the record of domestic violence reported in the state of West Bengal, India between 2019-2021.
The research has been undertaken by adaptation of three hypotheses:
The major study hypotheses are related to the ecological model of family as they assert the impact of social and economic structures and the larger environment upon individual and family behaviors.
Hypothesis 1
Physical family violence against women will be more prevalent among the lower socioeconomic classes and among families in which women are socially isolated (low social support). Psychological family violence against women will be more prevalent among the middle and higher socioeconomic classes.
Hypothesis 2
Family violence against women (physical and psychological violence) is more prevalent among families in which the husband uses alcohol or other substances.
Hypothesis 3
Family violence against women is more prevalent among women who witnessed their father beat their mothers during their childhood, than among women who did not witness this parental behavior
Information on Literature
Following an examination of terminology used in the literature to describe domestic violence, the report reviews the extent of domestic violence as determined from studies of homicide and assault. The nature of domestic violence is described in terms of victims, the scale and severity of violence, physical and psychological effects, effects on children, and the situational context. Explanations of domestic violence are offered that focus on individual pathology, social structures, and feminist issues. Legal remedies are then considered, as well as police reaction (response time to calls for assistance, arrests, crisis intervention, referral to other agencies, and attitudes). The importance of interagency cooperation and community awareness of the domestic violence problem should be stressed.
It was noted through the research that Family violence against women Is more prevalent among women who witnessed their father beat their mothers during their childhood, than among women who did not witness this parental behavior.
Physical family violence against women will be more prevalent among the lower socioeconomic classes and among families in which women are socially isolated (low social support). Psychological family violence against women will be more prevalent among the middle and higher socioeconomic classes.
The eligibility criterion that a family have at least one women between the ages of 15 and 49 with at least one child is likely to have resulted in an under sampling of women in the age group 15-24. This is a serious limitation of the study, since other studies based on community surveys and institutional records have highlighted that young women experience violence in the early years of marriage even prior to childbirth. The eligibility criteria likely contributed to the average age of women respondents being fairly high—31 years—and the duration of marriage long, an average of 12 years.
In terms of education and employment, the data are consistent with patterns confirmed by other studies. Rural women have the highest proportion of women with no education. At the other end, 60 percent of women in urban non-slum stratum have more than ten years of education.
A majority of the women (74 percent) do not engage in outside employment. Nearly one-third of the women in rural areas are employed compared to about one-fifth of women in the urban slum and non-slum areas. When employed, rural women are more likely to be engaged in seasonal and irregular employment than employed urban women, of whom 60 percent or more have regular employment. Men have more education and are more likely to be employed (approximately 97 percent) across all three strata. Nearly two-thirds of husbands had regular employment, especially in the urban areas. Men in rural areas are likely to have seasonal and irregular employment.
Marriage was predominantly arranged. Women reported agreement in about half of the marriages. With respect to dowry, nearly one-fifth of all women reported that dowry was demanded by their in-laws at the time of the marriage. Women living in urban non-slum areas reported dowry strikingly more often than women living in rural or urban slum areas. Similarly, new dowry demands since the time of marriage were reported more frequently by women living in urban non-slum areas than their counterparts living in rural or urban slum areas.
Analysis
It was explored bivariate relationships between the lifetime experience of physical and psychological violence among women and some of the household and personal characteristics that are strongly associated with such experiences. These factors include: socioeconomic status, spousal difference in education and resources, husband’s risk behavior, level of social support available to a woman, childhood exposure to violence, and a woman’s overall health status.
Socioeconomic Status
For socioeconomic status, rather than relying on income levels, which are notoriously problematic in developing-country settings, it was explored with the use of several indicators of household consumption. These included the type of housing and the type and number of appliances owned. Preliminary analyses with most of these measures suggest that there is a negative relationship between socioeconomic status and reported lifetime experience of physical and psychological violence among women.
The strongest association found was with the number of consumption goods owned. Women coming from families with fewer appliances are more likely to report being hit, kicked, and beaten. With respect to psychological violence, women who come from households with: a) lower levels of education, b) fewer household appliances, c) higher levels of husband unemployment, and d) higher levels of index women unemployment are more likely to report being demeaned, threatened, abandoned, and that their husbands are unfaithful. Researchers are in the process of further refining indicators of socioeconomic status—possibly through an index measure—and also testing it in multivariate analyses to see if such a relationship holds when other closely related measures, such as educational levels, are accounted for. Also, an unresolved interpretation issue is whether women among higher socioeconomic levels actually experience lower levels of violence or simply report it at lower levels.
Gender Gap in Education and Employment
In the bivariate analysis a strong association was found between physical and psychological violence reported by women and the unemployment status of both the husband and wife. More surprising was the strong and positive association between regular employment of husband and wife and the reporting of physical violence. Psychological violence was also strongly associated with regular employment of the husband. The results seemed paradoxical. If violence is an expression of gender power dynamics within the household, it is possible that a gender gap in employment status may be the critical variable. In line with this reasoning, gender gap in both employment and education will be explored in future research for associations with reporting of violence.
Both education and employment were significant for physical and psychological violence. The direction of association was that violence (physical and psychological) was more frequent when the woman respondent was more educated (>2 years) and had a better type of employment (p<.001 for both) than her husband.
Alcohol Consumption of Husband
In terms of husband risk behaviors, most women reported that their husbands were tee-totallers (60 percent) or at least not drinking to excess (9 percent) Nearly one third of the women reported their husbands drank to excess over the past year and another 16 percent reported their husbands drank occasionally. Surprisingly, there was no reporting of substance abuse by husbands (1 percent). An association was found between husband’s risk behavior (i.e., alcohol consumption) and reporting of violence. More than half of the women who reported their husbands got drunk once a week reported their husbands hit, kicked, or beat them. In addition, more than half also reported being threatened by the husband (56 percent)
Woman’s Childhood Experience of Family Violence
More than one quarter of women reported witnessing their fathers beating their mothers during their childhood. Women living in rural and urban slum areas reported witnessing this parental behavior more frequently than women living in urban non-slum areas. Harsh physical discipline during childhood was reported by 44 percent of the women. Similar to the pattern seen with witnessing fathers beating mothers, women living in rural and urban slum areas reported experiencing harsh childhood punishment more commonly than women living in urban non-slum areas.
Women who reported receiving harsh physical discipline as a child were more likely to report physical violence than those who did not by about 7-10 percentage points. Of women who were physically disciplined as a child, similar levels (21-26 percent) reported being hit, kicked, or beaten by their husbands, and a much higher proportion (48.5 percent) reported slaps. Similarly, women who reported witnessing their fathers beat their mothers were twice as likely to report being hit, kicked, and beaten themselves. This relationship is essentially identical in direction and magnitude for these three behaviors.
Conclusion
This research underlines that the situation of Indian women is quite critical in terms of the violence they experience in the marital home. Women are subject to frequent and multiple forms of violence in their lifetime. While dowry harassment has been the focus of attention as an important precipitating factor for violence within the marital home, the survey highlights that conflicts center around various aspects of gender roles and expectations. For example, women’s non-fulfillment of household responsibilities and men’s desire to control women’s sexuality were two of the major reasons cited by women as precipitating factors. This was especially apparent in the severity and consistency across strata of violence during pregnancy and of forced sex. The study offers a more complex understanding of the dynamics of gender power relations in marriage and the link to violence. For example, an important finding is that the gender gap in employment status is a significant risk factor for violence. Another important dimension of the study highlights the economic cost of violence to the household economy by estimating income loss from missed days of work and expenditures on health care due to violence-related injuries.
The research also tried to showcase that domestic violence experienced in the marital home in the Indian context is not a matter completely hidden between four walls. More disturbingly, the presence of violence is often well-known and accepted. More than half of the women reporting violence said that members of their immediate family (both natal and marital) were aware of the violence. In addition, 41 percent of the women reported that neighbors also knew of the violence. Fewer than 10 percent of the women reported that they left their husbands. Of these women, the vast majority returned either because their husbands asked them to or because their natal family convinced them to do so. More than 55 percent of the women reported that they perceive violence as a normal part of marriage.
Recommendations
Several key recommendations that come to mind as we reach the conclusion of this research paper are:
1) Norms of acceptability of violence should be more welcoming until then women will continue to experience physical and psychological violence in their domestic framework.
2) Greater access to education and awareness should be promulgated to women and also access to economic resources so that they could have a better position while negotiating conflict within marriage
3) The members who are aware of violence and is the site of first response to violence should act appropriately in a positive manner to provide safe shelter to the victim while condoning the act of violence.
4) Women’s freedom from violence is a basic human right and the state must make sure that it is diligently provided.
