Violence against Women in India: An Intersectional Approach to Human Rights

Abstract

Violence is physical and mental harassment which manifests in the forms of torture, harm, untouchably, insult, abuses, brutality, and many times in subtle forms. The women are generally suffered from this kind of violence not only in India and also in the entire world albeit reasons and forms of violence differ from regions to regions. The intersectional approach suggests that we will have to look at multiple forms of oppression and treat women as a heterogeneous category where factors like caste, class, region, locality, and language, and many others affects women in different ways and there is no single or only one form of oppression. For instance, the problem of Dalit women is completely different from upper-caste women. There is a tendency to treat women as a homogenous category and oversimplifying their oppression as something which affects all women across caste and class in the same manner. The rationale for such commonsense makes only sense when we consider women in relation to men as a whole. This reductionist approach to the question of women's oppression which ignores internal differences leads to later marginalization of marginalized among women and also creates new forms of discrimination and hierarchies which ultimately affects the lower strata of women and keeps their problem unheard and unanswered. Keeping this intersectional approach in mind paper will address the following questions: 1. What is the place of the question of violence against women within feminist discourse, to what extent they have been able to accommodate these issues? 2. To locate different areas of violence during a field survey in both rural and urban India which is to be selected based on violence-prone areas? 3. How and why the nature of violence is dynamic and how it differs among different sections of society?