This article assesses the prevalence and risk factors of domestic violence in India. The study uses the 2005-2006 India National Family Health Survey-III (NFHS-III) and focuses on the 69,484 ever-married women ages 15 to 49 from all regions, who were administered the domestic violence module. The results show that 31% of respondents experienced physical violence in the past 12 months before the survey; the corresponding figure for sexual violence was 8.3%. The multivariate logistic regression results show key determinants of physical and sexual violence. Some of the most salient findings are that urban residence, household wealth, affiliation with Christian religious denominations, wife's age at marriage and education are associated with lower risk of physical and sexual violence. In contrast, being employed and being the wife of a man who drank alcohol increased the odds of experiencing both physical and sexual violence. Moreover, respondents who believed that wife-beating was justified under certain circumstances were more likely to experience domestic violence. These results and significant regional differences observed in this study suggest that gender role conditioning and cultural norms both contribute to domestic violence. Interventions, therefore, need to go beyond the institutional and legal levels to include cultural capital, which addresses partner and relationship issues.

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This study presents an analysis of the population and crimes of women in a state prison for women in Hyderabad, India. Women in India are disproportionately incarcerated for violent crimes, in particular, offenses related to dowry. Using qualitative data gathered from interviews with 49 women, the authors examine the context of their lives and their paths to prison. Ultimately, the authors make a case for an intersectional analysis, one that seeks to understand the lives of women in a matrix of inequalities shaped by caste, class, and gender.

On 16 December 2012, India erupted in national outrage against the rape of a 23-year-old female student in New Delhi, christened “Nirbhaya” (fearless). In the aftermath, there was a convergence of multiple discourses that framed post-independent India’s feminist consciousness. In 2020, four men convicted of Nirbhaya’s rape and murder were executed. An eight-year old girl in Kashmir was brutally raped and murdered in January 2018. The trial court sentenced the main accused to life in prison. In December 2019, four men held in yet another horrific rape and death of a 27-year veterinarian in Hyderabad were killed by the police in what has been called an extrajudicial killing. More recently, in 2020, a 19-year old was raped and killed in rural Uttar Pradesh. The victims came from different social locations, castes, tribes, and religious communities. This paper presents a feminist critique of the legal discourse on rape and the death penalty. It looks at an ironical cooptation of the critique of sexual violence by a patriarchal discourse on social injury and collective conscience. The paper examines how fleeting rage against the culprits and the call for death penalty immunizes larger misogynist cultural assumptions. This myopic rage is oblivious to sexual violence in women’s daily lives. Finally, the paper looks at why legal reforms triggered by brutal acts of sexual violence, receiving widespread media attention, fail to achieve systemic societal changes.

This study analyzes data collected from a Public Defender's office in a Mid-Atlantic city, which represents females accused of homicide (N = 48) and defended between the years 1994-2011. Further, this study includes qualitative interviews of the Public Defenders who work in the Homicide Division of this jurisdiction and who defended the women accused of these murders in the courts. Results show that most cases involved intra-racial homicides of current or former intimate partners. Women who killed a boyfriend or husband and women who were diagnosed with battered woman syndrome (BWS) received lighter sentences. Interviews with Public Defenders highlighted the importance of the relationship between victims and offenders in the handling of homicide cases by the court.