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** Trigger warning: explicit mention of violence **
Among the many stories of domestic violence we heard that day, it is the one about the 74-year-old woman appealing for protection from her husband of decades that we found most appalling. What led her to file a case under the Domestic Violence (DV) Act after all this time, we asked. To taste the peace she had not known in years, she replied. And also, to reclaim her house and live there.
For her and several other women who had been harassed for years at their marital homes, help came from a nondescript group of women, not known by a name or advertised in a column. They hear out survivors and victims’ families, barge into police stations, and use the clauses of the DV Act to bring protection and justice to the abused women. They are a motley crew, some of them part of the women’s organisation Sakhi, others individuals of varied jobs, including lawyers and social workers.
Two months ago, they organised the Garhika Athikrama Prathirotha Samiti (Domestic Violence Prevention Forum) in Kottayam, hoping to bring together all those who wish to work for the cause. On June 28, they had a second meeting in Thiruvananthapuram, and they plan on holding one in every district in the coming days.
At these meetings, the women speak out about the abuse they endured.
“Do not skip my name when my story is told,” said Jessy S, a tuition teacher who wants the world to know what happened to her. Until a few years ago, she would have said the opposite, made an excuse for her bruised face and broken ribs, and not spoken of what went on at home.
Her house, which had been built for her by her sister, was in Pulluvila, a coastal village between Kovalam and Poovar in Thiruvananthapuram. Less than four years ago, she was found outside this house, bloodied and with a piece of cloth stuffed into her mouth, carried off on the shoulders of a heavy set man, her husband of many years, her abuser.
Just before she was taken to what Jessy believes was her death, a boy selling milk spotted her and raised an alarm. That’s the only reason she is still alive to tell the story, she believes. That close encounter with death had been her wake up call.
The DV protection group, who have quietly taken it upon themselves to reach out to abused and defenceless women like Jessy, came to her side. She told them her story from a hospital bed. They got her a protection order that came under the scope of the DV Act, which ensured the abuser would be kept off premises.
For four years now, Jessy has been free of her tormenter, but she is still unhappy about the unfinished business of divorce. “Despite there being so much evidence of prolonged abuse, [it drags on],” she said, disappointment evident in her voice.
She is grateful to the women who helped her, not just to overcome the abuse, but also to appreciate the value of her life. “I realised that if I died, he would not lose anything, only I would. I realised that there is nothing good about living an abused, unhappy life, just to satisfy the whims of a society that wants the woman to forego everything and keep a marriage afloat, just for the sake of appearances. What is the use of that?” Jessy asked, fully aware of her life’s worth.
Recurrent murder-suicides of women and children
Having come across several cases like Jessy’s, the DV protection group realised the need for a forum, said Mercy Alexander, the chairperson of Sakhi. “We wanted to bring together individuals and groups who are interested in working towards ending domestic violence and seeking justice for survivors. We are ready to work with the State,” she said.
They have already made impactful interventions in many cases, including those where victims died by suicide.
Mercy spoke about cases where they persuaded the police to add the sections of the DV Act in the first information report (FIR), while the officers often tended to reduce it to property disputes. “We would remind them that property disputes come under DV too. We would go to the stations and have very long conversations, to convince the police,” she recalled.
Several back-to-back cases of women dying by suicide with their children had led Mercy and others to reach out to the victims’ families.
Shyni, Jisemol, and Thara had died by suicide within days of each other–between March 20, and April,15–and each of them were allegedly subjected to years of domestic abuse. As recently as July 9, Vipanchika (33) had died with her baby, alleging harassment by her husband and family in Sharjah.
The death of Shyni and her two children in Kottayam in March this year was a trigger of sorts, Mercy said. She remembered the sleepless nights it had given her, thinking of the horrors Shyni must have endured. Mercy contacted Suja Susan George, a fellow activist in Kottayam, and reached Shyni’s natal home in Ettumanoor. They heard from her parents how Shiny, after completing her nursing degree, married Noby, who worked on a ship.
The bereaved family told Mercy and Suja that Noby used to be away for months at a stretch, and every time he came home he would physically abuse her. Shiny would, as a likely result of her patriarchal conditioning, suffer without telling anything to anyone, including her own family.
But one night, her parents brought her home after she was kicked out of the marital house two hours past midnight, bruised and bloodied. The police took statements, but not much came out of the investigation. Shyni still had to bear the weight of a loan allegedly taken by the husband’s family in her name.
“Once married, many women get little support from their families. In Shyni’s case, the father said that their house would go to a son, not the daughter. All liabilities are thought to be over once a daughter is married off,” Mercy said.
Jessy’s case was no different. She had repeatedly asked for help, pleaded to get a divorce from a man who had allegedly committed marital rape, brutally beaten her to pulp, had her hospitalised multiple times, and caused three miscarriages before a child was born.
“I was always told to keep quiet about it all, to not cause dishonour to the family. In the end it was an uncle, a priest in Italy, who stood by my side and spoke to Sakhi and others about everything I went through,” Jessy added.
The police have been supportive, Jessy said, adding that they have warned him of dire consequences for his repeated assaults. “But it did not come to any good, because after the police sent them away, [the husband] would go back to his old ways.”
Why DV Act should be invoked
In April, another woman in Kottayam’s Ettumanoor, lawyer Jisemol, another victim of domestic violence, died by suicide with her two daughters in Ettumanoor, her last act strikingly similar to Shyni’s.
On learning that no arrest was made even after days of her death, Mercy and team went to the Ettumanoor police station and demanded that sections of Domestic Violence be added in her file, shocked that it was not already there. “The general attitude of the police towards domestic violence is to try and settle it with words of warning, counsel them to compromise, and send them back home.”
Jisemol’s husband and father-in-law were later arrested.
The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act was drafted by Lawyers Collective led by advocate and women’s right champion Indira Jaising. It came into existence in 2005 and began to be implemented in 2006.
“Before 2006, we had the Criminal Law (Second Amendment) Act of 1983, which introduced a Section to address domestic violence (498A in IPC, 85 in BNS). However, it was concerned with cases of dowry harassment. So if a woman was abused for any reason other than dowry, it did not come under the scope of the act,” said noted feminist lawyer J Sandhya. She has come to the aid of many women including Jessy, and is part of the forum.
“The DV Act of 2005 gave us a lot of hope. But over time, it began to be seen as just another law, not taken in letter and spirit,” Sandhya said, adding that domestic violence is often trivialised.
“When the DV Act was first implemented, judicial officers from the state were given training. But all of that has lost its effect now. Besides offering training and giving awareness to all parties concerned, more resources should be dedicated towards tackling such cases,” Sandhya said, adding, “As of now, only one protection officer is assigned per district. A single person cannot reach out to every family in the district and keep abuse in check. It has to be assigned at the taluk-level.”
Patterns that repeat
At the Ettumanoor police station, about 500 of the roughly 700 criminal cases registered between January 1 and March 31 this year are crimes against women, Mercy said. She drew parallels, a reminder of the systemic failure to protect victims of violence: Uthra in Kollam (killed by snake bite by husband, who has been convicted), Vismaya (suicide abetted by dowry harassment), Priya in Alappuzha (suicide abetted by domestic violence).
“We had to make the same arguments in Thara’s case (who died with her two daughters in Karunagapally in April), in which there was a dispute over a property with her husband’s brother’s family. The husband was away when Thara and her two kids were not allowed to live in the husband’s house. The brother and family took over the place and would resort to hitting her when she went to question them,” Mercy said. She added, “After the quarrel got worse one day, she died by suicide, and her two little children who were in the same room as her burned to death. The Karunagappally police put it down as murder by Thara without mentioning the mental and physical harassment she had faced.”
Mercy, along with activist and politician Geetha Nazeer and a few panchayat members, went to the police station to question why sections pertaining to DV, mental and physical harassment, and dowry harassment were not added. “After many calls and follow ups, there was still no action. So we called Deputy Inspector General of Police Ajitha Begum; she had to intervene and speak sternly to them for the cops to make an arrest.”
Seeking peace through a protection order
The protection order prescribed by the DV Act has been a saviour for women who can not find respite in any other way. It merely states that someone found violating the protection order will be punished with up to a year in prison and a fine of Rs 20,000. But it is a paper coming from court, and hence puts some fear in the abuser.
However, advocate Sandhya said, “The law is operated without understanding. You need a feminist perspective to handle it. If a woman gets a protection order, the police should guard her. When such an order is issued by a court, a copy is sent to the concerned police station so they can stay alert and check on the woman. But here, even with a protection order in hand, many women continue to face abuse.”
For the women, it is often the beginning of a new life. Divorce cases may drag on for long and in some cases, the women are only interested in a separation from the accused, nothing legal.
“I am not looking for a divorce because I don’t have the intention to marry again,” said a homeopathic doctor who had borne physical torture and mental abuse for long before filing a case under the DV Act and obtaining a protection order.
She said she had an arranged marriage and had always subscribed to notions of the ‘ideal woman’. She even believed that it was her duty as a woman to put up with abuse and keep up the pretence of a perfect union.
The beating began on the sixth day of her marriage. Reasons could be as trivial as speaking to another person in the house or as insensitive as objecting to her breast-feeding their child. Verbal abuse and body shaming were part and parcel of that life.
“I told no one, thinking of the shame,” she said, now fully aware of the injustice, taking that very difficult step of leaving behind the conditioning she had so deeply absorbed.
For her, the trigger came not from the many instances of brutal abuse, but from the few occasions when it was made clear to her that the man had not an ounce of affection for her. “Once, when he was abroad, I had an accident. I made a long distance call to him, but he showered me with profanities and asked me to never call him again. For three months after that, he didn’t call or ask how I was.”
Another time, he spoke poorly of her by making comparisons to another woman he had been having an affair with.
That, for her, was the lowest point. In slow and measured steps, she got a protection order, completed her PhD, and achieved a name for herself. “He could not believe that I would file a case against him or do anything of this sort, I was that much of a stickler for norms,” she recollected.
Another woman, a 74-year-old writer, bore with torture for 45 years before finally calling it quits three years ago. The marriage had gone from bad to worse when their 19-year-old son died in an accident. “Even before that, it was no good, he would not even allow me to talk to another person. He has had multiple affairs and always physically abused me.”
Even in her old age, he did not spare her, barging into her house one night and beating her. By then, he had begun living with another woman and had two children with her. He wanted her to part with her property to give it to the son he had with his second partner.
“I had once signed off 45 cents of land to him, when he became too threatening. But without my consent, he can’t just write it off to someone else. After I got the protection order, he changed the locks to keep me out of my house. We had to move the court for it before he finally came with the key,” she recollected.
The DV group gave her both moral and legal support, including in getting her protection order, and later approaching the court for the right to stay at her house.
Washing off shame
In many of these cases, including the murder-suicides of abused mothers and children, the victims were educated, and even had jobs. Yet, they had for as long as they could, hid their suffering even from their closest ones because shame was ingrained so deeply in many of them. At the same time, attempts are being made to demonise the provisions of the law that deal with domestic violence and campaigns are organised against ‘fake’ domestic violence cases.
Sandhya observed, “The patriarchy is deep-rooted, even among the women who suffer the violence. Women born before the 1990s are often torn between knowing that they deserve better and not being able to end it. Those born after the 1990s are more aware of their rights and find it easier to come out of abusive relationships.”
Awareness is the key, members of the DV forum can’t stress enough. Geetha Nazeer, one of the key members of the group, said how a few of them travelled to Vipanchika’s house in Kollam, where they made frantic effort to convey her family’s desire to stop the cremation of their daughter and grandchild in Sharjah. They had suspected foul play, after learning about alleged abuse for dowry, and wanted to bring Vipanchika’s body back home. Geetha said that it is urgent that more people involve themselves in such support systems, especially among the young.
If you are aware of anyone facing mental health issues or feeling suicidal, please provide help. Here are some helpline numbers of suicide-prevention organisations that can offer emotional support to individuals and families.
Kerala
Maithri: 0484 2540530
Chaithram: 0484 2361161
Both are 24-hour helpline numbers.
Tamil Nadu
State health department's suicide helpline: 104
Sneha Suicide Prevention Centre - 044-24640050 (listed as the sole suicide prevention helpline in Tamil Nadu)
Andhra Pradesh
Life Suicide Prevention: 78930 78930
Roshni: 9166202000, 9127848584
Karnataka
Sahai (24-hour): 080 65000111, 080 65000222
Telangana
State government's suicide prevention (tollfree): 104
Roshni: 040 66202000, 6620200
SEVA: 09441778290, 040 27504682 (between 9 am and 7 pm
Aasara offers support to individuals and families during an emotional crisis, for those dealing with mental health issues and suicidal ideation, and to those undergoing trauma after the suicide of a loved one.
24x7 Helpline: 9820466726
Click here for working helplines across India.