Domestic Violence in Rural India: Phenomenological Study from Cultural Perspective

Historically, women in India have been experiencing domestic violence in various forms throughout their lives, irrespective of caste, class, religion, and region. The objective of this study is to gain a deep and thorough understanding of the causes and concerns relating to domestic violence in rural Indian sociocultural context. It also tries to understand the type of support the female partners get while coping with intimate partner violence through phenomenological principles. The purposive sample consisted of 15 rural Indian women. The results showed four main themes: (1) causes of domestic violence, (2) impact on health, (3) support received, and (4) dilemma of abused women. During the study the women came up with various causes leading to domestic violence that affected their physical and mental health. They also narrated the limited support they received in terms of protection from their family and/or neighbors, highlighting their dilemma and helplessness in the rural Indian cultural context. This study also attempts to show some insights on what Hindu religion says about women.     

The dowry system in Northern India: Women's attitudes and social change

In spite of modernization and women's increasing role in the market economy, the practice of the dowry in India is becoming more widespread, and the value of dowries is increasing. There are many well‐documented adverse consequences of the dowry system, particularly for women. This is a study of attitudes toward the dowry system among married women in the northern province of Bihar (N= 4,603), in which the dowry has strong roots in tradition. Hypotheses regarding antecedents involving attachment to tradition, exposure to modernizing influences, and self‐interest were developed. Each set of factors has some effects, and nearly two thirds of the women in the survey disapprove of the dowry. The practice may be quite resistant to change, however, because its social and economic consequences carry tangible benefits in an increasingly materialistic culture.     

Infancy and Childhood in India: A Critical Review

Empirical studies of childhood in India have been rare. Guided by universalistic theories of child development, developmental psychologists have seldom examined cultural variations in child-rearing patterns with Indian samples. Psychoanalytic studies of Hindu childhood have been influenced by therapeutic observations with segmented middle-class populations that are generally Westernized and educated, inviting a lively debate about the transferability of psychoanalytic individualism to non-Western contexts. Anthropological studies, invariably focused on cultural variation, have not searched for consistent cultural patterns in ethnographic materials on Hindu socialization. Based on fieldwork conducted in a village near Delhi, this article presents one of the first systematic quantitative and ethnographic studies of patterns of child care in Hindu extended families during the preschool years. The findings are discussed in terms of achieving a consensus between developmental, psychoanalytic, and anthropological observations of Indian childhood.     

Women's Scientific Employment and Family Formation: A Longitudinal Perspective

We focus here on the retention of highly qualified women scientists in science‐based employment in England and Wales. Using linked Census records from the Longitudinal Study 1971–1991 we show that women's education and employment rates in science, engineering and technology increased somewhat, although some fields show persistently low representation. We then compare retention in employing women with health‐related degrees with that of women with degrees in science, engineering and technology, showing that the latter group has markedly lower retention rates. Those who stay on in science‐based employment have children later than other types of graduate and their rates of non‐motherhood are higher. Four‐fifths of women in health‐related occupations were mothers, compared to only two‐fifths in science, engineering and technology. Our findings have implications for policymakers who wish to make best use of the knowledge base: attention should be paid to retention, as well as the more usual focus on qualifications and recruitment. The findings also suggest the potential for institutionally based theories to explain why highly qualified women have such low retention rates in science‐based employment.     

A Development Delivery Institution for the Tribal Communities: Experience of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in India

This article examines the varied impacts of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) as a development delivery institution for the tribal communities vis‐à‐vis other social groups across the Indian States, using the framework of new institutional economics. A number of State‐specific, socio‐economic institutional factors seem to be responsible for these variations. The article therefore suggests institutional reforms and convergence of the development initiatives of the Ministry of Tribal Affairs with the NREGS in order to realise the optimal potential of the scheme, and, in particular, to ensure greater livelihood opportunities for these marginalised groups and their entitlement to productive resources with greater socio‐economic and political empowerment.     

Rural Women Knowing All: Globalization and Rural Women's Organizing in China

Rural women in China are located on the periphery of that country's processes of globalization and modernization. They also, in the 1990s, acquired a voice of their own through the magazine Rural Women Knowing All. This magazine, founded through the intersection of Chinese and transnational feminisms, provided rural women with connections, knowledge and a venue for their own aspirations. Through examining the dichotomies presented by urbanization, the ‘global economy’, ‘culture’ and education, and activism and organizing, this article discusses the ways that Rural Women Knowing All transformed the meanings of globalization for contemporary Chinese rural women, and in the process granted them agency to shape rural identities and existences in alternative ways.     

The Impacts of Supermarket Procurement on Farming Communities in India: Evidence from Rural Karnataka

The rapid expansion of supermarket retailing, with its impact on farmer communities, represents a contentious part of India's recent economic development. This article reports on three districts of Karnataka, where a survey of 78 farmers supplying fruits and vegetables to Reliance Fresh, a leading supermarket chain, reveals low levels of vertical co‐ordination, a lack of written contracts, and highly competitive environments, with the quality parameters used by supermarkets specifying only a limited set of conditions. These findings suggest that supermarket‐led restructuring in India has not yet reached a stable institutional situation.     

Women in India: The Context and Impact of HIV/AIDS

ABSTRACT

The response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic on the Indian subcontinent has been hampered by several factors, including societal stigma, lack of educational resources, lack of economic opportunities, and the competing priorities for a nation just growing and developing an infrastructure for education, industry, and health. In particular, Indian women are silent victims in this epidemic because they do not readily have a respected voice in decision making and priority setting for the government. The epidemic is increasingly affecting and infecting Indian women (e.g., female commercial sex workers, married women, and pregnant women). The status of Indian women has placed them at extreme disadvantage because India is a country with socially progressive laws but has been slow to change its social norms. The reported HIV prevalence is low although many researchers agree a large amount of underreporting occurs. For India to address this emerging epidemic among women appropriately, it should focus on three intervention areas: (1) short-term solutions such as treatment options for those already infected with HIV to prevent further infection to sexual partners and children; (2) intermediate solutions such as education for those who are uninfected but engaging in behaviors that may put them at risk, such as injection drug use, engaging in commercial sex work, engaging in extramarital sexual relations, and having sexual partners who are not monogamous; and 3) long-term solutions such as addressing the root causes of inequality (e.g., disparities in education and employment and unwillingness to change social norms).     

Understanding Gender and Power Dynamics Within the Family: A Qualitative Study of Nepali Women's Experience

Among the Maori of New Zealand, Aboriginals of Australia, and other Indigenous peoples, family dynamics strongly influence the ways that issues emerge in counseling. This study explores aspects of gender and power within the context of birth practices in rural Nepal. In‐depth interviews were conducted with 15 postpartum women, as well as family members, to collect narratives of birthing experiences that highlight issues of oppression, marginalisation, and power struggles. Implications for multicultural and social justice awareness in family therapy are discussed, especially with regard to the subtle, disguised ways that power operates behind the scenes, often sabotaging efforts by health and mental health professionals to bemost helpful.     

To what extent are the indigenous women of Jharkhand,India living in disadvantageous conditions: findings from India's National Family Health Survey 1

Indigenous populations are the most marginalized and vulnerable communities in India, constituting 8.2% of India's total population, four times larger than the total population of Australia. The state of Jharkhand accounts for 27.7% of the total indigenous population of India. This paper compares the health and socio-economic and demographic indicators among indigenous and non-indigenous women in Jharkhand in terms of ‘disadvantage ratio’, by exploring the data of 1614 ever-married women (women who are currently married or who have been married at some point in their lives) from India's second National Family Health Survey (NFHS-2), conducted during 1998–99. The study revealed that the indigenous women of Jharkhand were highly disadvantaged in terms of socio-demographic, family planning, and important aspects of maternal health and nutrition compared to non-indigenous women. They were not only disadvantaged within the state in different parameters, but also across the indigenous female population of India as a whole. The findings call for urgent implementation of special health care strategies for reducing health and socio-economic/demographic disparities among the indigenous population of Jharkhand. ¹This paper was presented at the PAA Annual Meeting, Detroit, Michigan, USA during April 29–May 2. This paper is part of the thematic cluster Global Health Beyond 2015 - more papers from this cluster can be found at http://www.globalhealthaction.netView all notes     

The Who Concept of Sexual Health Applied to An Urban Poor Community in Mumbai,India

Objectives: The objectives of this study were to describe a scale that operationalizes the World Health Organization concept of sexual health and to assess factors associated with scale variation. Methods: Qualitative in-depth interviews (N = 39), sexual health interviews (N = 21), and survey data (N = 1,128) for this article are drawn from an Indo-U.S. project to reduce the incidence of HIV and sexually transmitted infections among poor urban married women (aged 18–49 years old) in Mumbai, India. Results: Lower sexual health status was significantly associated with gender inequity, marital violence, poorer marital relationships and physical health, and lower empowerment and social support. Conclusions: This work demonstrates the need to view sexual health in the broader context of community and family.     

Training Camp on Safe Motherhood in Rural India: A Research Note

ABSTRACT

The Center for Women Studies at the Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani (Rajasthan), India made an effort to combine theory and practice by implementing some of the discussions of an international conference that the center had organized on safe motherhood. A clinic was set up as a medical training camp in a village near Pilani. Measures to ensure safe motherhood included check-ups, interventions, advocacy, and counseling at the grassroots level. As a follow-up, the center has adopted the 12 by 12 initiative of the Government of India to ensure that each child has a percentage hemoglobin of 12 grams by the age of 12 years with special focus on adolescent girls.     

Rebirth of the Self: How Battered Women Experience Treatment

The study analyzes battered women's experiences of treatment processes and results. A qualitative methodology based on the phenomenological approach, including semi-structured deep interviews, was used in collecting and analyzing the data of 60 women who had undergone treatment in six different agencies. All the agencies were highly qualified in providing psychosocial intervention in cases involving domestic violence and were operated by the Israel Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. The findings reveal that the most significant experience for the women was being held and contained by the social worker, an action that allowed their recognition of self. Concerning outcomes, objective results such as taking action toward changing the violent relationship or leaving it were much less significant in the women's experience. Various aspects of the experience are described and analyzed, emphasizing the treatment process as a rebirth of the women. Implications for treatment based on this significant perspective are given.     

Towards standardization of field work practicum: experiential reflections from Delhi,India

ABSTRACT

Field work is the signature pedagogy of social work. As a central form of instruction, it enables the course of learning by enabling the students to perform the role of practitioner. Field work contains pedagogical norms with which students learn to connect and integrate theory and practice. The current paper delineates the pedagogy of field work practicum in the Indian context and attempts to explore the challenges in transaction of field work curriculum with respect to placement agencies, at the levels of supervisor and supervisee and the ever evolving and dynamic relationship between the two. Based on authors’ experiential accounts, the paper recommends few strategies for enhancing the scope of professional growth and learning within the broad realms of field work placement.     

Assessing Depression in Childhood and Adolescence: A Guide for Social Work Practice

Depression is relatively common in children and adolescents, and if left undetected and untreated, can have long-term negative consequences. Social workers providing services to families, children and adolescents need to understand the characteristics, and conduct developmentally appropriate assessments, of depressive symptoms. This paper provides a review of current literature related to the definition, prevalence, co-occurrence, and measurement of depression in childhood and adolescence. It also highlights relevant gender, race, and ethnic influences.     

Black lives matter,capital, and ideology: Spiraling out from India

Piketty's propositions for arresting inequality are discussed through the lens of racism/casteism. We focus on the case of India's George Floyds—the persistence of caste and tribe oppression under economic growth in India—through the insights of our long‐term ethnographic research. We show that inequalities are intimately tied to dynamics of capitalist accumulation in which racial/ethnic/caste/tribe and gender difference is crucial. We argue for an analysis that truly integrates ideology and the dynamics of political economy. The wider implications, we argue are political; they lie in the question of what is to be done. Despite his ambitions to decenter economics, Piketty remains trapped in the logic of economics for what he proposes are essentially economic reforms within capitalism. Moreover, ideological change cannot be a matter of choice only, and cannot be challenged solely at the level of ideas around economic inequality. It will also have to be fought as a direct contest of oppressive ideologies such as racism, casteism, and patriarchy, leading to new counter‐hegemonic positions. We will argue that this takes us from a global history of ideology to a global anthropology of praxis. A first step is to genuinely center conversations with disciplines like anthropology, sociology, and subaltern history studying people and voices from below and from the margins, and the perspectives of scholars and activists from below and from the margins.     

Women's Education,Marital Violence,and Divorce: A Social Exchange Perspective

Drawing on social exchange theories, the authors hypothesized that educated women are more likely than uneducated women to leave violent marriages and suggested that this pattern offsets the negative education–divorce association commonly found in the United States. They tested these hypotheses using 2 waves of young adult data on 914 married women from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The evidence suggests that the negative relationship between women's education and divorce is weaker when marriages involve abuse than when they do not. The authors observed a similar pattern when they examined the association of women's proportional earnings and divorce, controlling for education. Supplementary analyses suggested that marital satisfaction explains some of the association among women's resources, victimization, and divorce but that marital violence continues to be a significant moderator of the education–divorce association. In sum, education appears to benefit women by both maintaining stable marriages and dissolving violent ones.     

Sexual Relationships,Behaviors, and Experiences Among Bisexual Men in Mumbai,India

ABSTRACT

Objectives: This exploratory study attempted to assess a range of sexual behaviors, relationships, and related factors among a sample of bisexual men in Mumbai, India. Methods: Data collection occurred in two separate phases. First, focus group discussions were facilitated with local community members in order to finalize an interviewer-administered questionnaire. Afterward, structured interviews were conducted with a sample of 50 bisexual men using this questionnaire. Results: Participants reported a wide range of sexual behaviors and relationships with male and female partners. Conclusions: Findings have implications for future research and practice focusing on bisexual men in India,as well as their partners of all genders.