The insidious prevalence of domestic violence in India

When R, then 19, fell in love with a man from another caste, her parents made one thing very clear: She was dead to them. The first time he slapped her was 15 days after their marriage. He had forbidden her from meeting her elder sister. She went anyway. He apologised but the beatings became routine because she didn’t do enough housework, didn’t cook well enough, and talked back. “You’re letting me down. I hate hitting you,” he’d say and weep.

When she threatened to leave, he said he would kill himself. Rape was routine. Then, on a cold night in December 2021, he beat her so badly, she finally left. A friend had told her about a non-governmental organisation (NGO) that would help, and she has lived at a shelter run by Shakti Shalini ever since, completing her graduation but still trying to file a first information report (FIR).

Reconciliation, say the police. This is what happens to love marriages, they taunt. She only wants her husband to realise that what he did to her was wrong. But “there is no support for me, not from the police and not from the courts,” she said.

On paper, R is the statistic that should shame us all: One in three women and girls is subject to domestic violence. “It’s in every second home, and so normalised that nobody talks about it,” said Monika Tiwary, a counsellor with Shakti Shalini that receives, on average, five calls for help every day.

When women like R try to file complaints under the domestic violence (DV) law, the system grinds them down. “In seven years, I have not met even one woman who has been satisfied with the police response,” Tiwary said.

So insidious is this violence that a new report by the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime and UN Women finds that globally, every 11 minutes, a woman is killed by an intimate partner. That’s 45,000 bodies in 2021, killed by intimate partners and family members, making home the most unsafe space for women, a space in which far too many are trapped.

On paper, the DV law provides rights to protection, compensation and even safe residence. But on the ground, the stigma of a failed marriage prevents abused women from walking out, said senior advocate and an architect of the DV law, Indira Jaising. “Neither the parental family nor society offer support,” she said.

As long as girls are taught that marriage is their only goal, as long as they are conditioned to “compromise”, as long as they are taught that a bad husband is better than no husband, they will continue to remain in abusive relationships.

Until the monstrosity of his alleged crime, Aaftab Poonawala was your average abusive neighbour. His partner, Shraddha Walkar, had reached out for help, as far back as November 2020, in a police complaint that accused Poonawala of beating and trying to kill her. She told friends about the abuse.

Nothing happened. No FIR was filed. Two years later, she was dead.