India’s Women
Every 26 minutes a woman in india is molested. Every 34 minutes a rape takes place. Every 42 minutes a sexual harassment incident occurs. Every 43 minutes a woman is kidnapped. And every 93 minutes a woman is burnt to death over dowry.
Silenced by their culture large populations of women in India tolerate abuse and subsequent death because they have provided insufficient dowry. In a culture that is male dominated women are raised to be servants to their husbands often arranged to marry a man that they have never met. Women that are beaten or just unhappy must suppress their feelings to keep their husbands blissful or face shame and be turned away by their own families.
Indian women’s household must pay a dowry for the privilege of marrying a man of status. The dowry often consists of money, merchandise, or gold that is displayed when the couple is married. Women are being mistreated for insufficient dowry money because the groom’s family may be greedy and would like more items. If the bride’s family cannot provide more for the in-laws they will kill her so that he may keep the dowry he already had collected and then marries another that may possess more money or status. The original dowry is determined by the perceived value of the husband’s hand in marriage. If the husband is very desirable then he commands a very high dollar figure, if the offer of money is too low then the groom’s family will not accept it because it is an insult. “A woman held a PHD and married a man that was a shopkeeper with less education than she possessed. Her father provided a year’s worth of salary and many gifts. After the couple had been married six months, the in-laws requested a washing machine and other items that the bride’s family could not afford to give. They taunted the bride and eventually she was found hung from a ceiling fan. The groom was never convicted because he told the police she committed suicide, because she did not love him enough. Since the death took place in his home, they had no way of knowing if it was the truth. The woman was cut off from her relatives and had once asked her father to help her because she did not feel safe with her new husband. The father told her that she should give it time because he was not to intervene to early in the marriage, he wanted her to stay married at the time.” (Mandelbaum p...
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...n government needs make greater laws and try to enforce them strictly, but it is the men who make the laws in India and the religion that backs up this practice. The men are not to anxious to see this practice go and the religious do not see a need for change, so women’s groups must fight to help get a better quality of life for India’s women.
Years of silence must be ended in India with women choosing what they wear, say, and most importantly whom they marry with out the risk of being beaten or condemned.
Works Cited
Chaturvedi, Subhadra. “Whether Inheritance to women is a viable solution to the
Dowry problem.” Violence against Women V5N5, May 1999: p525-526.
Hegde, Radha S. “Narrative of Silence.” Communication Studies. V47N4
1996:.p303-307. “India dowry deaths increasing.” Women’s International
Network News. Vol22, Issue 2. 1996: p67.
Liddle, Joanna. Daughters of Independence: Gender and class in India. New
Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Mandelbaum, Paul. “Dowry deaths in India.” Commonweal Vol 126, October 1999: p18.
Waters, Anne. “Domestic Dangers; Approaches to women’s suicide in contemporary India.” Violence against Women V5N5, May 1999: p525-
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The wife 's desires for a girl also can be unselfish in their eyes by saying they are protecting them from a life of poverty since they had not yet had a son who could provide their prosperity. “Dowry deaths” are also an age old tradition that is a custom for the religion. But with the heavy problem of gendercide, the government outlawed the use of a dowry. But since tradition is so heavy and rich it still happens. The families want to live up to expectations and even if it is not “required” it still looks good for a family to compensate the other in a social standing. The problem with this is that they still see females as burdens even though there is no requirement to provide a dowry. It is the age-old tradition to give a dowry that is hurting the females. The old ways need to be adapted, and the culture itself needs to understand that it is okay not to provide a dowry. This is the only way change for females can come and ensure them a success and longevity in their
“The United Nations estimates that as many as 5,000 women and girls worldwide were killed last year by family members” (Autumn, 2001). Crimes of ‘honor’ are acts of violence perpetuated typically against women who violate broader cultural standards against sexuality and marriage. When a woman violates the sexual or marital standards within a culture, her actions bring shame and dishonor and in order to eliminate the dishonor within the family, killing is the only way. “Honor killings focus on maintaining the sexual exclusiveness of women” (Barker et al, 1999). In most of the cases, honor killings are mostly present in cultures of the South Asian and Middle Eastern Islamic areas. Sadly, this culture is prevalent in some parts of the Indian society as well. “Offenses leading to ‘honor’ killings include leaving home without permission, rumors about premarital loss of virginity, accusations of flirting, and illegitimate sexual contact. These accusations also do not require the consent of the female in the act. Rape victims, for instance,...
Gender-based violence is made possible by the ideology of sexism in Indian traditional culture which argues that women are worth less than men in the sense of having less power, status, privilege, and access to resources that is more prevalent in middle class and low caste families.
This is visible in Guatemalan case, where impunity is prominent as there are many unsolved and untouched investigations of women, who were raped, tortured, or murdered. In this case, it is not religious or cultural beliefs that have altered the violence; rather, it is a misogynistic prejudice. This is evident because police deem victims wearing makeup, fingernail polish, or supposedly revealing clothing to be prostitutes and decline to investigate their murders. Even something as simple as being a women being unaccompanied during movement can presume rape. Additionally, a law persists whereby a convicted rapist can be acquitted if his victim agrees to marry him, meaning that many victims of solved rape cases are coerced into abusive marriages for fear of their lives. With that being said, it is not surprising that a large number of women who are beaten or murdered by husbands and boyfriends are rarely
Women's rights is the fight for women to have equal rights to men. In India women have a secondary status within the household and workplace. This will affect a women's health, financial status, education, and political involvement. Women are normally married young, quickly become mothers, and are then burdened by this and also financial responsibilities. Unfortunately to this present day we are still fighting for women’s rights.
The first difference between American culture and Indian culture is marriage. A wedding is a great social event in our society, which establish a new bond between two individuals and families. Marriage is a joyful occasion with plenty of music, dance, partying and merrymaking. It also brings together a long-lost friends, relatives and acquaintances. In India, the parents choose the mate for their child, which is called an arranged marriage. In most cases, the bri...
There are different perspectives on the foundations of the nuclear family. For example, some argue that this form of the family is ‘natural’ and reflects the ‘normal’ and healthy biological urges of males and females as partners in reproduction. Others argue that the nuclear family does not represent a norm based on biological facts but rather exists alongside many other types of families such as single parent families and same-sex families. From this perspective, the family is socially constructed instead of being biologically determined, and society produces a dive...
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Moreover, the functional manager should be a subject matter expert and he should have the skill to manage the work in an efficient way as well as the process improvement responsibilities should also be handled by the functional manager.
In their lives too many women are abuse for such petty reasons and in all sorts of abuse, Sexual division of labor and gender expectations and a unheard and still disrespected voice.
Over the last year and half, it has been uncommon to see the word “India” in the news without the word “rape” accompanying it. In one instance, a 16-year-old girl from Dabra, India was raped by at least eight men for three hours. The assault was video taped and shown to the members of her village, including her family. After seeing the video her father committed suicide (Yardly). In another, a 23-year-old student was raped in a bus and died from her injuries, and in two separate occurrences 5 year old and a 4 year old were both abducted and brutally assaulted (Park).
Women have often been called upon to make sacrifices and suppress their personal desires.They have often been left on the margins of the social set-up as far as their personal desires and fufilment of those desires is concerned. Women are not a minority in our society but their “lives, experiences and values have been treated as marginal” and men’s experiences have been assumed to be central to society. One also needs to contest the often stated view that in India women have always enjoyed a place of respect and dignity, that they have been respected as ‘devis.’ It needs to be seen that “the respect and privileges which accompany the position of a ‘devi’ are not only anti-individualistic,” they are also anti-humanistic and “deny women a personhood”.
In today’s globalized world, women’s studies is emerging as a fast growing discipline which is not restricted any more to the academia but is significantly capturing the attention of the civil society. The way civil society responded to “Nirbhaya” gang-rape case of December, 2012 in Delhi; the way people came on the streets in protest against this horrific and barbarous crime committed against a 23 year old woman; this people’s movement has undoubtedly engineered the emergence of a new consciousness among us about the need for a realization of women’s honour and dignity in the society. There have been serious debates on the issue of whether more stringent laws (in the line of Shari’a law) be implemented in our Indian society so that such heinous crimes against women can be prevented. However, the aforesaid incident is only one among many hundred other such crimes happening everyday in almost every corner of the globe. Many such incidents of crime are either suppressed or do not come to limelight. The following analysis is a humble attempt to deal with the status of women (especially in Islam) in a globalized world.
“A family can be defined as a set of people related by blood, marriage or in some other agreed upon relationship, or adoption, who share primary responsibility for reproduction and caring for member of society". (Schaefer, 2009, p. 288) This leads to a wide open range of interpretation on the exact definition of how a family is truly made up. Depending on your culture, religion, or geographical location a family may represent and be comprised of many different ideals and social norms. There are many theoretical perspectives that have their own interpretations on the subject of what a family is and how it is perceived. I will attempt to expound on three of these perspectives; Functionalism, Conflict, and Interactionalism.
Amanda Hitchcock. 2001. “Rising Number of Dowry Deaths in India.” Annual Editions: Anthropology 11/12, 34th Edition. Elvio Angeloni. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.