This was published on January 24, 2014 here.
Last week, the Indian Ordinance Factory, Kanpur announced that it had designed and manufactured a .32 bore lightweight revolver for
women, to be sold in “specially designed boxes lined with velvet to make them
more attractive.” The gun was evocatively named “Nirbheek.” Commentators have pointed out that guns rarely make anyone safe and that the guns which cost over Rs. 1 lakh
will secure those who can already afford security. Moreover, a gun will not
protect someone from violence within the home.
Women’s groups usually prefer to put guns away in the interests of safety rather
than pull them out and put women indoors; this is an opportunity to reflect on
their activism to this end.
Simplified ideas about womanhood correlate femininity with motherhood
and assume that all women being (or potentially being or feeling mainly like)
mothers, must abhor violence and bloodshed. Therefore, it is “natural” for
women to favour gentler modes of human interaction and to oppose (in a motherly
way) the use of landmines, small and large weapons and weapons of mass
destruction. To rehearse that view would be to caricature over a century of
peace activism by women and decades of feminist scholarship on conflict and
violence.
Having said that, it is true that motherhood is often a
pivot around which women mobilize for peace work. Motherhood offers an easy
entry point into the public sphere despite patriarchal ideas about women
belonging to the private sphere. And for individual women, it has often been
concern about male family members that has motivated them to step outside the
home. Disappearances, whether in conflict or under dictatorship, have usually
been the prompt. Mothers’ organizations were formed in Argentina and Chile,
and later in El Salvador, Bolivia, Brazil,
Uruguay and Paraguay; their
objective was to draw attention to their children who had disappeared during
the years of authoritarian rule in these countries. The official figures remain
much lower than the Mothers’ estimations, and even now, their struggle
continues. Closer home, Parveena Ahangar’s Association Of Parents Of Disappeared Persons in
Kashmir and Visaka Dharmadasa’s Association of War Affected
Women and Parents of Servicemen Missing in Action
are examples of mothers taking the political lead to locate conflict’s missing
people.
In Nagaland, we also have the example
of the Naga Mothers’Association (NMA).
With “Shed No More Blood” as a motto, the association which is open to every Naga woman who is a
mother, has worked on the ground to defuse tensions as they rise. They approach
and speak to leaders on all sides, asking that violence be avoided. The NMA has
also built bridges within the Naga groups. Motherhood has outweighed gender to
provide women with access and agency that formal political and peace processes
deny.
But women’s groups do not oppose arms
because they are mothers or might be motherly. It is their lived reality that
governs their opposition to the proliferation of weapons and to militarization,
in general.
The International Action Network on
Small Arms reports from research by IANSA members across the
world to say that guns or access to guns are used routinely to threaten,
intimidate or facilitate violence against women. Women’s organizations support
arms control and disarmament programmes because small arms and light weapons are often used to facilitate sexual and
gender-based violence but during and outside conflict contexts. Research shows
that when there are guns handy, they are likely to be used also in domestic
violence. In the American context, where there is a constitutional right to
bear arms, the presence of a gun in the home was found to increase the risk of suicide among women fivefold and the risk of homicidal
violence against them threefold. If acts of sexual and gender-based violence
are a leading cause of death among women, the proliferation of small arms has been seen to contribute to making them more fatal.
In post-conflict settings or in
highly militarized contexts, where violence is the lingua franca of politics,
the habit of brutality carries over into homes. Rehn and Sirleaf’s now-classic
assessment on “Women, War and Peace”
drew out these connections clearly. Demobilized soldiers and surrendered
militants, for instance, can be violent in their private interactions. If
demobilization is not accompanied by disarmament, this means they keep weapons
that can be used against family members or others in the community. Given the
challenges of reintegrating them into society and helping them find a
livelihood, if disarmament does not accompany demobilization, then these former
soldiers are available to organized crime, can take to random thuggery and for
political violence. (Demobilized women soldiers have other problems that we can
discuss in another column.)
Militarized settings—which include
areas where police or army action is common and they are a visible presence or
where non-state armed groups are active—build this violence into the very
fabric of everyday actions and interactions. Neighbours become informers, and
trips to buy tomatoes end in death. It is not just sexual and gender-based
violence that women’s organizations worry about but also the long-term
implications of living with anxiety about the safety of one’s family, of
strategizing every excursion and limiting one’s movements outside, of limiting
one’s life-chances because of safety concerns and of living with increasingly
severe and violently imposed moral policing. The guns, literally and
metaphorically, change the quality of life drastically in such places. Everything
is fragile. Men are more likely to lose their lives in these situations, and
women who are left to rebuild the peace become very invested in ending
violence. The ManipurWomen Gun Survivors Network is an example of women’s activism motivated by such experiences.
Women oppose the proliferation of
guns and light weapons not because they have motherly instincts but because
they see that easy access to these has a negative impact on everyday life. They
present an increasing risk and fear of violence and intimidation as a result of
which educational, livelihood and quality of life are affected in the moment
and in the future. Living with injury, trauma and bereavement are hard; to find
yourself responsible for your household without any means and without the
freedom to step out for fear of violence is an impossible situation. Small
weapons bring that risk of violence into the home, into service spaces (like
hospitals and schools) and into the workplace. And at the end of it, these weapons
do not secure lives, in the public or the private sphere.
Do guns cause violence? Of course not, people use guns to cause
violence. However, the easy availability of guns makes it possible for anyone
to use them without much thought. In an age where we oscillate between seeking
excuses for violence and bloodthirsty outrage, the commercial availability of
another small weapon cannot be good news for anyone—even if it comes packaged
in an attractive velvet-lined box.
Swarna Rajagopalan is
a political scientist by training and writes on gender, peace and security
issues. She is also the founder of Prajnya.
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