Dowry: the price a woman pays
Wedding Procession: Bride Under a Canopy, Crica 1800 (Credit Wikipedia)
"Of course I was sad but, I was content also. He would no longer abuse, beat and torture me in order to extract more money from my 60 year old father."
"Little did I know that my son would follow the same footsteps of his father and do the same to me, so I fled," Phoolmati, said with firmness in her voice.
She adds some chopped ladyfingers to a pan of hot oil and tucks her sari into her waist; the scars on her waist still visible despite her dark complexion. She was 42 when her husband died of alcohol poisoning but her problems did not end there. Her 26 year old son continued the trend of beating her to extract money from her father. This led her to flee, leaving behind her torment and her seven year old daughter.
"During my pregnancy, my sister had come from her village to look after me. My husband said to her,' you did not give me any dowry, that's why I have to work so hard; give me a good dowry and I will stop beating your sister'.
Even though her father had given one of the two lands he owned to his only daughter's husband and sold off some of his wife's jewellery to pay for the demands of her husband, it was not enough.
A few days into the marriage it became clear to Phoolmati that, 'sex and money' were the only reasons he had married her. During the first six months of her marriage she had lost 20 kilograms of weight, however, she now seems healthy.
Bent by age, 52 year old Phoolmati Singh from Sundargarh, Orissa works as a 24 by 7 maid in Delhi to save money for the dowry she assumes and expects she will have to give for her 17 year old daughter's wedding.
In her village, dowry is an explicit custom where people have no knowledge of dowry prohibition laws and the Panchayat turns a deaf ear to dowry related problems.
Phoolmati said: "One woman was burnt with cigarettes every time her parents failed to meet the in law's dowry demands. Her husband wanted money to pay his mortgage, that's why he had married her."
Phoolmati is just one of the hundreds of thousands of married women who are brutally abused by their husbands every day to extract dowry.
Anuradha Vinayak, a social activist of Jagori- Resisting dowry in India, said, "This abysmal state of women is an outcome of people in rural India treating women as a burden; they (women) are considered a liability".
According to the Indian national crime records bureau, the cases of reported dowry deaths in 2013 were 8083. There were 10,709 reported cases of dowry registered under the 'The Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961'. Reports of crimes against women in India such as rape, dowry deaths, abduction and molestation have increased by 26.7 per cent in 2013 as compared to the previous year.
Every day, more than 22 women die -- mostly burned -- from violence inflicted on them by husbands or family over dowry demands. Over the last three years, nearly 25,000 women have been victims of what is called a 'dowry death', according to the Ministry of Home Affairs.
One of the workers at Seva Samithi, a women's rights group, said that the figures are gross under estimates of the reality on the ground. Women are often too scared to come forward to report rapes or domestic violence for fear their families and communities will shun them.
A United Nations (UN) report based on a range of distressing social statistics rooted in gender and caste prejudice, said that India is the "most dangerous country in the world to be a girl in."
The UN report analysed differences between male and female child mortality rates. The report has revealed that over the last 40 years from 2000 to 2010, there were 56 deaths of boys aged one to five for every 100 female deaths.
It's very hard for us to put strategies in place if no one tells us it's going on," Manish Tripathi, sub inspector Sansad Marg Police Station said.
When asked if any strategy is being implemented to encourage women to report such incidents like offers of speedy trials, Tripathi said, "This may be difficult to implement and we may need to create some sort of new system."
"Every month I see around 10-12 cases of dowry related violence and in most cases, domestic violence forces women to report," he added.
What is dowry system?
Dowry is a centuries old custom which involves a woman's family paying her new husband's family. It is still prevalent in some parts of South Asia, Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe. It's also practised in some communities of Britain. It's when the husbands do not receive 'enough' money in exchange for marrying their new bride that women can come to be on the receiving end of horrifying abuse. Worldwide, around 14,000 dowry deaths have been recorded according to a UNICEF report.
Bride on wedding illustration
Dowry was banned by the Indian government in 1961. 'The Dowry Prohibition Act', which makes it clear that anyone giving or receiving dowry can face up to five years imprisonment and a hefty fine but remains largely unenforced. In 1986 an amendment was made that any death of, or violence to a wife within the first seven years of marriage would be treated as dowry related violence.
Human rights lawyer Falak Naaz, said, "The anti-dowry law needs to be amended and the government's decision to make section 498-A compoundable, will serve in favour of women."
"There will be scope for settlement or compromise between the complainant and the accused but not at the cost of legal provisions," he added.
Indifference, apathy and corruption of the many and varied government departments and village Panchayats, have led to people having no faith in the police or the judicial system which results in the vast majority of dowry crimes, as with other crimes against women going largely unreported.
The infamous system of dowry, a corrupt illegal method of financial exploitation and violence, is sanctified by the waters of tradition and culture and is a manipulated term often employed to maintain prejudicial social conditioning and resistance to change. Despite all the negative ramifications and the legal, social and moral boundaries, the reality remains that the dowry still prevails in India and so does the violence and deaths associated with it. Women are still treated with prejudice, burnt alive or tortured, just to fulfil the insatiable lust for money in the name of 'dowry'.
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