2025-12-12 –, Room01
The paper interrogates grassroots realities on protected legal rights (PWDVA 2005, IPC 498a) through Indian lawyers vs. women’s psychologies and epistemologies driving their perceptions, desires, and decisions in processing violence cases.
The paper draws on the victims’ and lawyers’ chapters of a manuscript, “The Purchase of Human Rights (forthcoming). The manuscript is based on qualitative, partly ethnographic fieldwork interviews, questionnaires & participant observations of women victims, accused, natal families, lawyers, judges, mediators in panchayats, adalats & courts. Primary data was collected in 8 states of India between 2006-2012 with secondary data analyzed on additional cases from 2012 to 2024.
The paper analyzes the discourse of 95 women victims and lawyers on their perceptions and justice aims in cases of beating, sexual violence, attempted burning, torture through electric currents, food deprivation and expulsion from their homes.
In delving into victims’ and legal actors’ psychologies, the paper offers profound insights into various norms and epistemologies, important to addressing issues that have continued for generations.
Not only economic disempowerment, but ingrained identities surface as more influential in decisions despite knowledge of legal rights. This too surfaces in legal actors’ case aims. The paper highlights how women’s self-identification as well as legal actors’ imputed identities for them, are strongly affected by understandings of gender and familial roles, religious norms, natal family and marital family norms, community stigma and shame.
This, in turn, is used as a lens to interpret drastic effects on womens' case processing objectives, behavior, and consequent profound effects on their lives.
The paper argues that laws themselves, including human rights laws, even if well implemented and vernacularized, are still not substantively changing peoples' lives as they are not changing the psychologies and epistemologies of those they are designed to protect nor of their contextual co-actors
RelisLaw Center for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism
Role in the Panel:Paper Presenter
