Tag: gender-based violence

DAY THIRTEEN: Whom to Blame? Negotiating Vulnerability and Living in Safety in Assam 

In the border state of Assam, India, public discourses often link gender-based violence with immigration but Ivy Dhar offers us a different picture that is more complex. Her research suggests there is no clear connection between immigration and an increased violence towards women and girls.

Ivy Dhar 

Featured image: Scene from a play Labhita. Courtesy of Dwijen Mahanta. Source: Wikimedia Commons. 

Assam, a state in North-East India, has witnessed multiple episodes of ethnic conflict over time. The phrase bahiror manuh (outsiders) has come to largely connote anybody who could not be identified as indigenous to Assam till the 1960s. Its usage further picked up momentum and had the effect of drawing attention to bideshi (foreigners) or undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh in the 1970s and 80s. Post-2000s, those believed to be immigrants have been publicly labelled, almost permanently, as “Assam’s sorrow”. In recent times, smaller indigenous communities have asserted a strong anti-immigrant sentiment.  

It is widely understood that political instability often engenders organised crime. Along with the continued political unrest in Assam, crime against women has increased at a faster pace, which stands to be the highest in India in 2021. Problematic media report in alarmist ways about how migration and demographic changes affect the social milieu. This is, however, not the full picture. 

Growing up in Assam, choosing to migrate in the 1990s to a metropolitan area in search of prospects of education and career, though my research interests kept my interaction intact, I cannot help but question whether the spaces today are in fact more unsafe than before. Dowry was almost unheard of when I lived in the state, whereas today domestic violence and dowry death list as a high concern for Assam among other states of North-east India. Cruelty by the husband and his relatives has a fair share in the numbers as well. Reports disclose that women at home feel unsafe. 

The narratives that I have gathered through an open-ended questionnaire and unstructured interviews with women and girls (aged 16-49 years) living in urban areas of Assam on why the struggle for women’s safety is so challenging suggests that there is no clear connection between immigration into Assam and the question of women’s safety. One respondent felt that women have become educated and more visible in public spaces, but society remains patriarchal and work-culture demands for mobility push women to further vulnerability.

Domestic violence, abuse, and domination of women in the neighbourhood are regularly observed, and safety is easily compromised. Young girls are targeted in public transport and streets. Women’s vulnerability is highly at stake in spaces that one frequents daily and not only in isolated zones. This is not a recent phenomenon. 

A woman in her 40s observed that teasing or physical molestation was not uncommon in public spaces when she was in her teens, and women of similar age have confirmed such responses. Posing the query alike to girls brought to light that, though teasing is rare, they have come across incidents of molestation in crowded places and perpetrators of sexual harassment were often known to the victims. Girls have disclosed that they feel unsafe going outside the home alone, especially during night hours. They are mostly accompanied by family members. They may also feel uncomfortable wearing clothes of their choice given the public glare. A respondent often advises her teen daughter to come home early, be alert, and remain in a group outside the home so that she stays safe. Interestingly, issues of safety are more openly discussed in the present times by parents and schools but to my understanding, the threat has remained where it was two decades ago.  

The guardians of law and order insist that Assam’s higher crime rate against women is due to higher reporting. In that case, is the state responsive and listening carefully? A respondent rightly pointed out that there seems to be no regulated effort by the state to understand women’s vulnerability.  

A discussion on women’s safety brings the stark existence of patriarchy and misogyny that is often entrenched in everyday practices in more ways than the statistics can reflect. Women respondents have confirmed that sexist slurs are frequently used by men to objectify women.

In social conversation, bonori (unchaste), kulta (woman who has sexual relation with many men) and, kulokhini (attaining dishonour for the kin) all of them denote ‘bad character’ women, who are deemed to tarnish the family image, whereas ghorelu and potibrotastree define women who are of ‘good character’ devoted to home, spouse, and his family. Similarly, mekhelartolorejua is usually addressed to men who have the image of being submissive to women. Such standards and stereotypes harden discrimination in many ways and may pressurise women to give up on many individual pursuits.  

I agree with one respondent that crimes against women are not a result of any one single reason. She noted that immigration has caused anxiety and is suspected to have contributed to the existing crime rate. But these debates about immigration are also ways to make the safety of women a political issue, whereas social and cultural contexts are completely ignored. 

Assam’s image as a women-friendly region under threat from immigrants is a generalised notion that clouds a more complex reality.  

Acknowledgement: I am thankful to Papori Das and Jasodhara Borthakur for establishing contact with the respondents.  

Author’s Bio

Ivy Dhar is an Assistant Professor at the School of Development Studies, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi. She was a Fellow (Junior) at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML). She has taken an avid interest in researching the development and political issues of North-east India from the beginning of her academic career. Her broad interest areas are democracy, conflict and gender, water and development, and material culture and have published on related topics in journals and books.  

DAY TWELVE: I Never Ask For It: Building Testimonials to Gender-Based Violence

Over nearly twenty years, Blank Noise has worked with citizens and communities across India and beyond to build testimonials of gender-based violence. Blank Noise rests on the power of feminist collaborations and building feminist solidarities, writes its Founder-Director Jasmeen Patheja in today’s blog.

Jasmeen Patheja

Featured Image: Clothes from the I Never Ask For It campaign. Image credit: Jasmeen Patheja.

An idea has no significance or meaning unless someone makes it their own.

Blank Noise is a growing community of Action Sheroes/ Theyroes/ Heroes: citizens and persons taking the agency to end gender-based violence. Blank Noise was initiated in 2003 in response to the silence surrounding street harassment in India and globally. While for the first decade, Blank Noise worked to bring attention to street harassment, its next phase was an inquiry into the nature of victim blaming. Blame permeates spaces of violence. If blame has been used to justify violence against all identities and spaces, how can we be Action Sheroes everywhere? Not just on the streets, but in our power at home, on campus, at our workplace, on the internet.

In 2003- 2004, since the start of Blank Noise,  I reached out to women around me, to speak with me about their experiences of street harassment. Responses ranged from “it doesn’t happen to me”, “how can you ask me this question – I am not that type of a woman”, to “it happened to me, I was wearing my school uniform and it still happened.”  

The dominant climate back then was ‘good girls’ don’t experience it, don’t name it, and if you do experience it, you ‘asked for it’. Fear and the threat of street harassment was a given and normalised. 

The more I listened, I paid attention to the fact that garments were being recalled and named in testimonials. I recognised that there was a pattern here in the way we narrated. The noticing became an inquiry. 

Nearly 20 years later, no matter where I go (urban, rural or internationally), I still ask the question “Do you remember what you wore when you experienced gender based violence? Is there an unnamed, yet unforgotten memory of discomfort where you remember the clothes? What makes so many of us, across identities and geographies, remember?”

The first 8-10 years of I Never Ask For It was about making the garment a ‘truth’ visible to ourselves and the public we engaged with through the press and media. We were recognising that women in all clothes, women across identities, age, religion or faith experienced it. We learnt to say #INeverAskForIt. 

Participants build the I Never Ask For It project at public sites. Image credit: Jasmeen Patheja.

I Never Ask For It has grown from an idea and campaign to a mission. The 2004 version of I Never Ask For It issued the first call to action inviting survivors of violence to bring or ‘discard’ the clothes they were wearing when they experienced violence.  We moved from the idea of inviting and encouraging survivors to speak to the campaign’s current phase emphasising, “speak if it serves you.”  

I Never Ask For It is a place for memory – to keep our memories safe. It works towards building ten thousand garment testimonials and bringing them to unite at sites of public significance. We share this number because we are motivated by what it would take to build this – the healing it could offer, the feminist solidarities it could initiate.

I Never Ask For It has been built slowly, iteratively, through the years. It has been co-created with feminist alliances and through listening. We ask ‘who is yet to be heard,’ and that drives how we design its path ahead. The practice at Blank Noise is located within socially engaged art practice and movement building.

I Never Ask For It behind the scenes includes workshops, campaigns, research projects, public actions such as ‘Walk Towards Healing’, Listening Circles, public talks and more. It has moved away from its early ‘myth breaking’ and making this truth visible approach to now claiming, “We are done defending. I Never Ask For It”. The garment is merely a witness. It bears memory. It was present at that moment. We believe there is power in bringing the garments together, standing united in solidarity; power in speaking if it serves the speaker. 

We are building testimonials, but who has the capacity to listen? I Never Ask For It is about learning to be a listener. It is an injustice to ask survivors to speak if we do not have the capacity to listen.  I Never Ask For It rests on building our collective capacity to listen. The burden of memory is not mine, or ours alone.

Over the years, I Never Ask For It has been shared at multiple sites including Ars Electronica – Austria (2005), Kitab Mahal (2006), Abrons Art Center (2017) , Ford Foundation Gallery (2018), and is now also at Khoj International Artists Association through their ongoing show called Threading the Horizon.

Watch this powerful video of their work here.

Author’s Bio

Jasmeen Patheja is an artist in public service mobilising towards the right to be defenceless. Patheja has worked to end gender based violence and victim blame for nearly two decades. She founded Blank Noise in 2003, in response to the silence surrounding street harassment. She mobilises citizens and individuals to take agency in ending sexual and gender-based violence. Patheja designs methodologies (tareeka) to confront fear, fear politics, warnings, and victim blame surrounding sexual assault. Patheja works towards building the capacity to listen to survivors of sexual assault and the capacity to care.

Jasmeen works with multiple forms of media. She is also a photographer. She is a TED and Ashoka Fellow.

DAY ELEVEN: The Politics of Reproductive Mobility: Criminalisation of Abortion as Gender-Based Violence

Sinéad Kennedy connects the politics of mobility with the right to access abortion in this illuminating piece. She says, “Criminalising abortion did not stop Irish women from ending their pregnancies; If they were “mobile”, they travelled to Britain to access abortion. If they were “immobile” they risked a 12 year prison sentence and sought clandestine, illegal abortions even if that meant putting their lives, health and liberty at risk.”

Sinéad Kennedy

Featured image: ‘Stop Policing My Body in Dublin’, taken by Aerin Lai

In almost all European countries abortion is permitted. According to the Centre for Reproductive Rights, standard European practice is to legalise abortion on request or broad social grounds, in at least the first trimester of pregnancy. In addition, most countries also ensure that abortion is legal throughout pregnancy when necessary to protect the health or life of the woman or pregnant people. Only in a very small minority of European countries, namely Poland and Malta, does the law prohibit abortion in almost all circumstances.

Yet, abortion provision remains subject to criminal law: abortion services may largely be provided as part of maternal and reproductive health, but unlike other aspects of healthcare, abortion continues to be conceptualised within a legal framework.

So instead of the law guaranteeing the right to abortion, abortion is understood as a criminal offence – either by the person seeking the abortion and/or the medical practitioner providing the service – and therefore only permitted within a legally controlled framework.

The consequences of violating this framework include hefty prison sentences. No other form of healthcare is subject to this level of criminalisation and it creates a profound “chilling effect” on both those seeking abortion care and on healthcare providers offering legal abortion services.

Even in countries where legal restrictions may only apply to the stage at which abortion is available, criminalisation still results in a precarious social and legal situation for people in need of abortion, forcing many to travel to access the services that they need. This system of “enforced” mobility disproportionality effects those with neither the means nor the ability to be “mobile”, particularly poor women, disabled women, migrant women and pregnant people.

Abortion access, therefore, is intimately connected with questions of mobility and immobility. Mobility allows some people to move and requires other people to remain fixed in place. Thus the term “mobility” captures both movement and “stuckness,” meaning the ways in which movement occurs, and the attempts to regulate or prevent it.

Reproductive mobility is used by states to regulate and discipline the act of reproduction. Particularly as embodied in women’s fertility; it becomes a means of fixing fertility: dealing with, sorting out, and putting it right.

Reproductive mobility is a contested space; a site of conflict but also a site of potential political transformation. Indeed the issue of reproductive mobility has become a key aspect of abortion activism. For example in Ireland, where abortion was criminalised in almost all circumstances except where a woman’s life was at risk, abortion activists have long exploited the political potentialities inherent in reproductive mobility, underscoring the hypocrisies and vulnerabilities inherent in the Irish state’s regulation and control women’s fertility and mobility. During the successful 2018 “Repeal” campaign to legalise abortion, activists highlighted how Irish women have long sought to access abortion through mobility.

For decades in Ireland, abortion was shrouded in secrecy and shame. Then, in 2013, the story of the death of Savita Halappanavar because an international story that exposed the violence behind Ireland’s criminalisation of abortion. Savita, a 31 year-old Indian national living in Ireland, attended a leading Irish maternity hospital, miscarrying for 16 weeks. Doctors there felt unable to offer standard medical treatment due to the presence of a foetal heartbeat. Pleading for her life, Savita repeatedly asked for an abortion but was refused and was told “Ireland is a Catholic country”.  Five days later she died of septicaemia.

The Irish campaign to legalise abortion that exploded in months after Savita’s death saw the historic silence around abortion evaporate as thousands of women came forward to tell their abortion exile stories publicly through campaign groups like TFMR (Termination for Medical Reasons) and anonymously through the In her Shoes campaign.

These stories included the experiences of women who have been raped; women who were denied life-saving medical treatment like chemotherapy simply because they were pregnant; women with desperately wanted pregnancies, who after receiving the devastating diagnosis of a fatal-foetal anomaly were told they must continue their pregnancies to term regardless of the outcome.

Criminalising abortion did not stop Irish women from ending their pregnancies; If they were “mobile”, they travelled to Britain to access abortion. If they were “immobile” they risked a 12 year prison sentence and sought clandestine, illegal abortions even if that meant putting their lives, health and liberty at risk.

Most importantly, these abortion stories themselves also “travelled” between national contexts, becoming a key focus for activists in Malta, in Poland and in United States. These stories highlighted the enforced immobility of many women within borders, especially asylum seekers who remain “stuck” and unable to access abortion because they lack mobility. This political form of storytelling not only humanises women and pregnant experiences, but also exposes how a state’s control and criminalisation of reproductive healthcare amounts to nothing less than state-sanctioned gender-based violence.

Author’s Bio

Sinéad Kennedy teaches in the Department of English at Maynooth University, Ireland. She was a founding member of Together for Yes, the 2018 campaign to remove Ireland’s constitution ban on abortion and continues to campaign for reproductive justice in Ireland through Action for Choice.

DAY ELEVEN: Anti-Abortion Ideology on the Move: Examining Mobile Crisis Pregnancy Centers

You likely wouldn’t think of volunteers at crisis pregnancy centers—unregulated anti-abortion non-profit organizations that masquerade as health clinics—as the backbone of the anti-abortion movement. But this industry has become a primary mechanism through which the anti-abortion movement spreads its ideology writes Carly Thomsen. 

Carly Thomsen

Featured image: “Devil Bus” by Rayn Bumstead, graduate of Middlebury College, where she was co-organizer of the Queer Artists’ Collective. “Devil Bus” highlights the dangers of mobile CPCs and counters the happy, rosy, and warm aesthetics that mobile CPCs use to downplay their political agendas. 

When you think of who makes up the anti-abortion movement, you might imagine activists protesting in the streets. Or political lobbyists working with conservative lawmakers to enshrine their beliefs into law. Or religious leaders condemning abortion. You likely wouldn’t think of volunteers at crisis pregnancy centers—unregulated anti-abortion non-profit organizations that masquerade as health clinics—as the movement’s backbone.

But the crisis pregnancy center (CPC) industry has become the primary mechanism through which the anti-abortion movement spreads anti-abortion ideology. Indeed, the anti-abortion movement invests more time and resources into CPCs than any other aspect of their work. Such funneling of resources reflects the anti-abortion movement’s belief that CPCs are a useful site from which they can make mobile anti-abortion sentiment and enact what we ought to consider gender-based violence under the guise of care and concern.

Deception is central to this work. Scholars, reporters, and activists have illustrated what CPCs’ deceptive practices look like: disguising their political and religious motivations; implying that they offer abortions when they do not; opening near abortion clinics with the intention of confusing and thus hijacking those en route to the clinic; and peddling false information regarding abortion.

Scholars found, for example, that 80% of crisis pregnancy center websites listed in state resource directories for pregnant women include false or misleading medical information, including that abortion leads to breast cancer, infertility, and mental health issues, among other claims that have been repeatedly proven false.

Such inaccurate information is given credence by the aesthetic decisions of CPCs, which suggest that they are medical clinics when they are not. For instance, some CPC volunteers wear white lab coats and some CPC websites include medical imagery. Perhaps more worrisome, CPCs also increasingly offer free ultrasounds, although they do not make clear to clients that these ultrasounds are meant to be “non-diagnostic,” and therefore are not medical in nature.

Recently, the CPC industry has started to take their anti-sex, anti-abortion messages on the road, using mobile on-the-go buses and vans to extend their geographic and political reach. Mobile CPCs use many of the same strategies that brick-and-mortar CPCs use; however, their geographic slipperiness raises additional concerns beyond those associated with stationary CPCs.

First, mobile CPCs are able to park immediately outside of abortion clinics, allowing them to get closer to abortion seekers than brick-and-mortar CPCs can. Second, their mobility allows them to travel along routes that can constantly shift; this unpredictability and nimbleness makes more difficult possibilities for anti-CPC resistance. Third, mobile CPCs spread anti-abortion messages while in transit, quite literally moving around anti-abortion sentiment in ways that brick-and-mortar CPCs simply cannot. Fourth, if we listen to what the CPC industry tells us, mobile units are allowing the anti-abortion movement to more effectively target low-income women, women of color, and women in rural areas. Lastly, mobile CPCs will be even more difficult to regulate than brick-and-mortar CPCs.

If a city or state were to pass laws restricting the activities of CPCs in their jurisdiction—as most states and the federal government have done regarding abortion—mobile crisis pregnancy centers could simply drive to a neighboring area without these same laws in place, a problem that would remain even if passing legislation to regulate brick-and-mortar CPCs became common.

Despite these problems, there are no state or federal laws regulating mobile CPCs and there are no large-scale feminist campaigns directed specifically at mobile CPCs. In fact, we don’t even know exactly how many mobile CPCs exist. In the U.S., where the anti-abortion movement has utilized mobile CPCs more than in any other country, estimates of the numbers of mobile CPCs in circulation range from 170 to 260. (For context, there are approximately 2600 brick-and-mortar CPCs in the U.S. and just 700 abortion clinics.) While the U.S. is the epicenter of the CPC industry, CPCs exist in more than 100 countries. They are clearly a global problem. According to a Heartbeat International database, there are, for instance, 249 CPCs in the United Kingdom. And there are eight mobile CPCs outside of the U.S.

Regardless of the scale at which mobile crisis pregnancy centers operate, they raise concerns worthy of consideration by scholars, policy makers, and activists—especially because the anti-abortion movement is increasingly using mobile units to spread Evangelicalism, medical misinformation, and anti-abortion ideology. In so doing, mobile CPCs, like brick-and-mortar CPCs, raise serious public health and data privacy concerns.

Mobile CPCs, therefore, should encourage those of us on the political left to re-think the positive affects that tend to stick to mobility and movement. Mobile crisis pregnancy centers use their mobility to reproduce dominant power relations, further entrenching the sexism, racism, and classism of the status quo through remaking the spatiality of reproductive politics.

In short, mobile CPCs demonstrate that movement and mobility can thwart people’s opportunities to develop liberatory imaginaries, desires, and futures. While CPCs’ mobility has created new possibilities for the anti-abortion movement to capitalize on people’s marginalization and enact the kinds of gendered violence inherent within anti-abortion activism, it also could inspire new forms of abortion justice and anti-gendered violence activism. We might just have to hit the road to do it. 

Author’s Bio

Carly Thomsen is assistant professor of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Middlebury College. She is the author of Visibility Interrupted: Rural Queer Life and the Politics of Unbecoming from the University of Minnesota Press (2021) and directed and produced In Plain Sight, a documentary short that extends the arguments of this book. For more information about the film, visit http://www.inplainsightdocumentary.com. She’s currently completing a book about queer reproductive politics. Learn more about Thomsen’s research and teaching at www.carlythomsen.com.

DAY TEN: Whose Success, Whose Story? Indian Women on dependent visa

The narratives of migration experiences are predominantly male-oriented. Women have always been part of the migratory journey, but they are often left unseen and unheard. Read about the story of Rashmita and the violence of dependency perpetuated by the state in the form of a dependent visa.

Tasha Agarwal

Featured image: bastamanography, http://www.bastamanography.id/Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Rashmita Das from Maharashtra is a software engineer and a proud employee of a multinational firm. She is proud because she has always been an achiever and has bagged this reputed position, which paid her lakhs (hundreds of thousands of rupees), in the first round of placement held during the final year of her college. Being an educated and financially independent woman, she had her dreams, aspirations and expectations for herself. Her family arranged for a groom from the same profession, working in the US on an H1B visa offered to foreign workers in particular occupations. She married him and got settled in the US on a dependent visa known as an H4 visa. What followed in the aftermath of her migration was the unanticipated turn of her life, shattering her dreams and confidence. She found that she does not have permission to work on an H4 visa. She was scared and worried about the idea of being confined at home. The restriction on work meant that she would be financially dependent on her husband for every need, which was hard for her to accept. She could not understand why she cannot work when she was skilled enough to work. In fact, in many instances, she would help her husband in his office work at home but yet she was the dependent.

The charm and excitement of the ‘American Dream’ started fading away, and she felt lonely most of the time, confined at home. Family and friends in India would explain to her how lucky she was to be in the US and that she should stop complaining. Her loneliness turned into anger, frustration and depression. Her husband Manav could never understand why Rashmita was always talking about the need to have a job when she could have the luxury of staying at home and enjoying life. But that is not what she wanted. All she was longing for was to have an identity for herself. Manav’s sympathy soon turned into frustration, and there were frequent spells of verbal clashes, which later turned into physical abuse. Later they had a child in the hope of fixing their issues and easing her loneliness. However, things did not change much. The physical and verbal abuse became more frequent, and she started contemplating the idea of getting a divorce. She was devastated to know that in the case of divorce the principal visa holder gets custody of the child. Her visa becomes invalid because the H4 visa holder is dependent on the principal visa holder. She would have to leave the country without her child. In the blink of an eye, she felt that she lost everything. She was forced to continue in an abusive relationship to be with her child.

The narratives of migration experiences are predominantly male-oriented. Women have always been part of the migratory journey, but they are often left unseen and unheard. The story of Rashmita Das resonates with many other women in the US on an H4 visa. Though the magnitude of the issue may vary from case to case, the dependency perpetuated by the state in the form of a dependent visa has impacted many women in the US.

Every year approximately 85000 Indians leave India to join the labour market in the US on an H1B visa. There is a parallel migration stream with an approximately equal number of spouses of these H1B visa holders. Data shows that due to the systematic exclusion of women in the labour market, almost 80% of the H1B visas petitions are filed by men; implying that most H1B visa holders are men and most H4 visa holders are women (USCIS, 2019, Balgamwalla, 2014). These H4 visa holders, despite being equally skilled and educated, are legally constrained from entering the labour market. Their immigration to the US and their continuity of stay are contingent on the principal visa holder, i.e., H1B holder. The visa restricts them from possessing a social security number or even a bank account which makes women completely dependent on their husbands.

The vulnerable space in which a woman is pushed due to such a visa is exploited by many men to perpetuate violence. There have been increasing cases of physical and verbal abuse, depression, and anxiety among several thousands of women who are forced into dependency by the state. Ironically, the US was the first country to organise a national movement for women’s rights in 1848 yet after several decades, a large chunk of women have been deprived of their right to live with dignity.

The state perpetuates the patriarchal notions of social roles by assigning superior positions to men through immigration laws. Despite the US being a land of opportunity, there is no level playing field within the immigrant household. On the one hand, H1B visa holders have ample scope to excel in their careers; on the other, their married women counterparts are pushed into the confines of domestic spaces where they can be trapped in abusive relationships.

While an article on 24th February 2009 from Forbes read ‘Indian Americans: The New Model Minority’ applauding Indian immigrants in the US for their achievements and successes. But the question to ask is–whose achievements and whose successes are we talking of? Whose success stories are we extrapolating under the banner of ‘Indian’s success story’?

Author’s Bio

Tasha Agarwal is presently working as a Consultant in the Ministry of External Affairs. She has a PhD degree from the School of Development Studies, Ambedkar University Delhi and an M. Phil degree in Educational Planning and Policy from NIEPA. Her research interest lies in the field of international migration and gender, refugees and education. She has been associated with several national as well as international projects by Stanford University, SAAPE, and NCERT. She has also worked with national-level education bodies to develop innovative learning tools such as audio-visual content, comic books etc.