The phenomenon of `missing women’ in India was highlighted by Professor Amartya Sen because they are discriminated against `from womb to tomb’ which caused 37 million deaths. Another study in 2008 estimated that 44 million women are missing because of gender bias, neglect of girls, infanticide, and feticide . These include cases of dowry deaths. For these million females, `homes’, which supposedly provide comfort and security, are being turned into torture chambers . Dowry violence is taking a toll on the lives of women.
This work interrogates the increasing incidences of dowry violence and its severe impact on the physical, mental, and emotional health of women. It argues that despite legal reforms, women are encountering increasing vulnerability because, over the decades, dowry violence is normalized, trivialized, and routinized legally as well as socially.
While qualitatively analysing several real-life cases reported in the media or adjudicated by the courts, this work maintains that dowry demand is not a simple exchange of gifts but it is a unilateral coercive transaction where the groom and his family exhibit their voracity to acquire quick wealth by exploiting women. It claims that dowry violence is evolving in its severity, scope, and outreach, and expanding globally where women are experiencing brutal torture that involves compulsory and arbitrary demands, harassment, humiliation, blackmail, and abuse for dowry payments to the extent that some are murdered, burned alive, or forced to commit suicide. In many situations, women are taunted, held hostage, and dehumanized daily to extort cash and valuables, including vehicles, land, jewellery, lavish gifts, and so on. To eliminate this extreme violence, this work suggests breaking the silence and calling for a multi-prong, comprehensive, survivor-centric approach, globally and nationally, besides sociolegal reform.
