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Research on sexual and gender-based violence in India predominantly focuses upon sexual violence and harassment perpetrated by strangers or child sexual abuse, while in relation to domestic violence and abuse (DVA), the overwhelming focus remains on marital relationships. The recent surge of research, feminist activism and policy attention to sexual and gender-based violence in India has scarcely addressed DVA within non-marital intimate relationships, in a context where such relationships are becoming more commonplace yet attract gendered risks and penalties for women/girls. Drawing upon life/relationship history interviews with 36 victim-survivors aged 18-35, this presentation will apply a gender lens to this gap by exploring the nature of victim-survivors' constrained agency in response to domestic violence and abuse within their intimate relationships. I analyse women’s strategies to end abusive relationships in the face of men’s coercive and controlling behaviour intended to prevent women from leaving what are commonly clandestine relationships.  Intersecting social relations of power based on gender, age, caste and religion have implications for women's exercise of agency in the context of such violence and abuse as they seek to navigate and survive the interconnected interpersonal, familial and structural violence that shapes their journeys out of the abusive relationships.

 

Prof. Sundari Anitha is Chair in Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK. She has researched and published widely across the two areas of violence against women and girls and the intersection of gender, race and ethnicity in employment relations. She was previously a caseworker/manager at domestic violence refuges in the UK and has been active in activism, advocacy and policy-making on violence against women for over 25 years.  She served as a member of the UK's research assessment framework, REF 2021 Sociology sub-panel.