The National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) data pertaining to spousal violence has recently raised alarms across the country. Nearly 83.8% women in Telangana agree that a husband is justified in beating his wife for any one or more of the specified reasons, followed by 83.6% women in Andhra Pradesh and 76.9% women in Karnataka. While digital media is widely circulating these numbers with clickbait titles like ‘women justify wife beating’, there is little to no analysis on why women are not standing up against domestic violence.
The most common reasons chosen by women for justifying being beaten by the husband are disrespecting in-laws and neglecting the house or children. Other reasons include being unfaithful, arguing with the husband, refusing to have sexual intercourse, not cooking proper food and going out of the house without informing.
With shocking statistics, it is necessary that news media prods into the several factors that may be responsible for shaping the answers to the survey. Insights from these journalistic practices might be useful in pointing out the gaps in policies and rethinking the way ahead. A society’s gendered norms dictate social attributes, day-to-day expressions and psyche that one must adhere to be able to successfully perform their gender role. Women are socialised to accept, tolerate, and even rationalise domestic violence (Measurement of Domestic Violence in NFHS Surveys and Some Evidence, Oxfam India). The perfect woman must carry the crowned burden of ‘izzat’ (both honour and shame) in a household inevitably correcting, censoring and blaming herself at the slightest deviation from the prescribed norms. The six specific reasons in the survey question, are in fact, only a few from the endless list of prescribed behaviours of the women in the society. Similar impositions are placed on men to uphold ideals of patriarchy. The perfect man must possess physical strength, carry a macho personality, and display anger to maintain a superior position. Women grow up idolising this masculine image of a man too from the men in their own families and through popular culture like films and songs glorifying the quintessential ‘mard’ (macho man). So, when the husband, who earns for the entire family and protects the household, delivers the occasional beating of the wife, rarely faces any opposition from anyone in the house. This is the gendered reality of a woman’s everyday life. If headlines do not put in the effort of discussing these complexities of gender while reporting on surveys such as the NFHS-5, readers are often misled into believing statistics prima facie without the opportunity for much reflection.
The age and familial position of the women surveyed might also be of relevance in understanding the women who justify being beaten by husbands. The NFHS selects a woman respondent at random from each household to be able to maintain confidentiality in sensitive survey questions of violence. In the top three states of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, women between the age group of 40-49 were more likely to justify the use of violence by their husbands than the women belonging to the age group of 15-19. It is possible that older women in a household hold positions of authority over other female members of the family as mothers, mothers-in-law or grandmothers. Knowing whether the surveyed women have either sons or daughters of their own might also aid in understanding the intensity of patriarchal conditioning that makes women justify violence on themselves.
The veracity of the violence question in the survey is also affected by other socio-psychological aspects that influence the psyche of women. There is deep-rooted fear in women who lead their entire lives under the circumstances of domestic violence. The top three states of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka also have low percentages of women reporting a domestic violence incident. It is improbable to expect answers other than in the affirmative when women are asked if violence by the husband is justified. Moreover, there are also contextual and intergenerational aspects of domestic violence as per the state reports. Women whose mothers were beaten by their fathers are more likely to be in abusive marriages themselves as compared with women whose mothers were not beaten by their fathers. If women live with endless trauma, often in the same house as their perpetrator, how safe would they feel to speak against the violence? The logistics involved in asking deeply personal questions create further barriers to gaining meaningful responses. Inadequate privacy and confidentiality in households make women vulnerable to more harm while participating in this survey. While field agents are supposed to be trained to check for privacy, they hold little agency as an outsider to ensure it or prevent its breach.
The loose and tangled threads of social fabric, the inequality and the vulnerability of specific genders such as woman, trans persons and other non-binary genders should be detailed when statistics are headlined in informative pieces. The absence of any analysis fuels the destructive power of patriarchy by making facts susceptible to misrepresentation. When women are depicted as validating wife beating, it reinforces violent exhibition of masculinities by men. At the same time, existing policies fall short in discouraging deep-rooted conditioning of the society. Legislations such as the Protection of Women Against Domestic Violence Act or the Indian Penal Code penalise cruelty to women by imprisoning the offenders, who are members of the family. These offenders might often be providing financial security to the family, making it much harder to deter domestic violence in households. At the same time, women who manage to defy societal practices by calling out the violence are stigmatized for dishonoring the family. There is a huge void between enacted laws that criminalise domestic violence, and societies that continue to normalise it. These bizarre numbers in surveys should act as a catalyst for conversations across platforms on issues of gender and sexuality, pleasure and consent, violence and the rights against it. States would have to incentivise education, independence and employment among women to help them break the cycle of violence.
Schools should discourage gender stereotypes by introducing gender sensitisation practices, inculcating sex education curricula that enable minors to develop a nuanced understanding of gender and sexuality. More immediately perhaps, there should be a stop to peddling news headlines that reduce all complex and messy discourses to a single, neat statistical figure.
Shreyashi Sharma works at the Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Ashoka University. She is trained as a lawyer with litigation experience on issues of gender violence. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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