Violence, Law and Women’s Rights in South Asia

Violence against women is a manifest and incontrovertible fact in South Asia. Deep-rooted biases against women, derived from patriarchal and stereotypical attitudes, continue to have a very negative impact on women’s lives. The problems that women face range from domestic violence, sexual violence and dowry related violence to violence and harassment in the workplace, and violence connected with discriminatory inheritance rights, low social status and economic deprivation. In this context, the law and state policy can both become important tools to ensure justice and protect women’s rights. This very insightful volume critically analyses the law and law enforcement in three South Asian countries–India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka–in order to assess the response of the criminal justice system to violence against women. The contributors assert that the gap between reality and the practice of laws in these countries is unfortunately very wide and women who are victims of violence are further victimised by discriminatory laws, the apathy of the judicial system, and the systematic manipulation of legal provisions. They explore the opportunities to change the legal systems and make them more responsive to women’s human right to justice and freedom from violence. Through an examination of actual cases, the contributors show how gender biases affect judicial decisions, sometimes in crimes as heinous as rape and the murder of women for dowry. The contributors make a forceful case for ensuring substantive equality, eliminating gender discrimination and removing discriminatory and archaic laws by radically reforming the legal systems in the region and attuning them to current realities. In order to achieve this they propose that standards and norms in international human rights treaties that have been ratified should be made a part of domestic laws; law and law enforcement should be radically transformed to make them gender sensitive; the women’s right to life and protection against violence should be made an enforceable fundamental right. Written by well-known experts, this thought provoking volume will be valuable not only to teachers and students of law, gender studies and sociology but also to policy makers, the legal fraternity, and all those who are interested in knowing how the legal systems in South Asia actually function and the scope and need for reforms.