Thursday, January 29, 2009

Security lessons amid disaster ruins

Published in InfochangeIndia.org on December 24, 2008

Disasters like the tsunami are so destructive that in their wake, everything has to be rebuilt. This destruction actually leaves a blank slate upon which societies can inscribe more equitable norms, more sustainable structures and more rational processes, says Swarna Rajagopalan on the fourth anniversary of the Asian tsunami

Four years ago, early on the morning on December 26, my bed shook violently but I turned and went back to sleep, not thinking that disaster was about to strike Chennai in a little while. It had already struck the coasts of Indonesia and Thailand and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, but in Chennai, lulled to a pleasant winter night’s rest by the music season, our wake-up call was still about an hour away. For everyone in a tsunami-affected area, this is a ‘where were you when…’ moment that we will never forget—either in grief or in gratitude.

In that moment when a disaster strikes, life changes irrevocably. Earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, volcanoes and other disasters, natural and manmade, are milestones in the human story, serving both as endpoints and starting lines. The deluge that bookends mythical epochs across cultures as well as the words we use (disaster, catastrophe, calamity) reflect our awareness that disasters are significant beyond their physical consequences. The frequent clubbing together of disasters and conflicts in relief and reconstruction contexts as well as impact comparisons suggests that these are comparable in the way they reflect pre-existing insecurities and inequities on the one hand, and in their disruptive ways. The fourth anniversary of the Boxing Day Indian Ocean tsunami that hit communities all the way from Indonesia to Somalia is an appropriate time to reflect on what disasters teach us about security.

By causing death, destruction of property and displacement, disasters rend the social fabric of a community. Spouses are lost or killed, children orphaned and families separated so that the most immediate source of security and support is lost to individuals in affected communities. The home is the site where women work and spend the most time, and the loss of the home is more to them than the loss of a physical shelter. From this emotional trauma follow many practical challenges. Who will take in the children, especially adolescents? How bereaved parents will rebuild their families and who will make decisions about this, is another issue.

Disproportionately more women and girls die during disasters.¹ Right after the tsunami, an Oxfam report provided several instances, such as Cuddalore where there were 391 female deaths to 14 male and Aceh where only 189 out of 676 survivors were female.² The fact that girls don’t learn to swim, it was found, contributed to their inability to save themselves. As death, trafficking and displacement alter the sex ratio of a community, other insecurities arise, especially for women. Early marriage, forced marriage, forced polyandry and a loss of reproductive rights are some of these; after the tsunami, there were many cases where women felt they had to opt for recanalisation surgery in order to rebuild their families.

When women survive the disaster, the relief environment is often hostile to them at multiple levels. Their most immediate needs for privacy, hygiene and safe and clean sanitation are seldom met. Relief planning has traditionally been centred around male heads of households, and while this is changing, the personal needs of women and girls still get overlooked when camps are set up and amenities distributed. A place to bathe, change and wash that is safely accessible at all times without fear of teasing, stalking or molestation is a simple need which unmet, creates tremendous strain, insecurity and health problems for women and girls.

When livelihoods are destroyed, as the tsunami did when it destroyed boats, how are families to pick themselves up and start over? The loss of livelihood is a challenge that aid packages do not address. Where the development process has encouraged a diversification of livelihoods, through the teaching of other skills especially, people have something of a safety net. Where a community depends on one source of income and one kind of work, recovery is particularly long-drawn-out. Women preponderantly work in the agricultural and informal sectors which disaster seems to disrupt most. Finally, the organisation and delivery of disaster relief is also a problem when the heads of households are killed or displaced, and when the household is separated. Even today, disaster relief all too often is designed around male heads of households, making it difficult for surviving females, alone or as heads of households, to access any sort of help. In their consequences, natural disasters reflect and perpetuate existing injustices.

The loss of family and livelihood increases vulnerability to violence even as disasters, like other moments of crisis, seem to lead to increased levels of violence in society. Child abuse and neglect, intimate partner violence, sexual violence and exploitation are likely to become more common after a disaster, according to a 2005 World Health Organisation report.³

Disasters displace five times the number of people than are displaced by conflict, with the numbers being estimated to cross 200 million each year. The same report adds that displaced persons living in a disaster-affected area are especially vulnerable because they are already cobbling together a living, away from their homes and original livelihoods. Moreover, because the presence of large numbers of refugees sometimes contributes to environmental degradation, the area itself is more vulnerable.⁴ If there are multiple communities of displaced people in an area, resentments arise between them when the levels of international, state and community support to each community varies.

Where civil society is weak or exists in opposition to the state, there are simply fewer hands on deck; information and resource-sharing are problematic and political considerations trump humanitarian ones. The Maldives and Burma are good illustrations. The impact of the tsunami in the Maldives facilitated a brief period of cooperative engagement between nascent civil society groups, which seized the moment to draw attention to the movement for reforms. The grudging political concessions yielded in the aftermath of disaster became the first steps to the democratic transition the atoll-state saw in 2008. In Burma, while the space for political activism is extremely small, reports suggest that civil society organisations did manage to get relief materials and food to Cyclone Nargis-affected communities. The cyclone has provided an opportunity for them to prove their seriousness of purpose and also as in the Maldives, to draw attention to the military regime’s callousness and cupidity.⁵

There has also been some interest in whether disasters alter inter-state relationships.⁶The 2005 Kashmir earthquake necessitated the opening of transit points and communication links between the two sides of the ceasefire line between the two states, and thereby facilitated some confidence-building between the states. Conversely, the conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir meant that sometimes the shortest route to deliver relief was not accessible to either side and in general, security considerations preclude joint disaster mitigation planning and information-sharing.

Disasters like the tsunami, the Kashmir earthquake and Cyclone Nargis are so destructive that in their wake, everything has to be rebuilt. This destruction actually creates a blank slate upon which societies can inscribe more equitable norms, more sustainable structures and more rational processes. But this is an opportunity that is squandered time and again.

Relief operations are predicated on existing social relationships and reconstruction assiduously puts back together the unequal playing field that nature destroys. Property rights are an example. If land titles are usually registered to men, it is hard to get that changed in favour of female heads of households. Assistance flows to those who are in a position to access it, and quite often that excludes those who need it most. In the aftermath of the tsunami, distribution of food in some parts of Tamil Nadu was organised along caste lines, recognising and reinforcing traditional dining protocols. Even the dire need of earthquake victims could not completely dismantle India and Pakistan’s anxiety about sharing intelligence and allowing overflight.

Security for an individual begins with the right to life and is rounded off by the right to live well. Security for a community begins with the right to co-exist with other communities, explicated by cultural and economic rights. Security for a state should mean the security of individuals and communities within its territory as well as their institutions of governance, but it comes to refer to ever-narrower groups and sometimes to the survival of a specific political dispensation. Disasters undermine all these, and therefore, are arguably security crises in their own right.

Natural disasters do not target particular actors, groups or collective entities. Undermining national state and continental demarcations, razing to the ground resorts, government offices and tenements and engaging every willing hand in the operations that follow, they illustrate the limits of old ways of viewing politics (and the arena of policymaking) and security.

Deforestation on one side of an interstate border causes landslides and avalanches on every side. Floods redraw watershed maps without regard to administrative divisions. The use of air-conditioning in Hyderabad contributes to global warming and rising sea-levels which threaten coastal communities around the world. At the impact end, coping with a disaster like the 2002 Gujarat earthquake, all within one state’s limits, involves volunteers, resources and supplies from across the world. A global effort to coordinate relief and reconstruction was one of the earliest responses to the 2004 tsunami, with India using the moment to simultaneously assert its self-sufficiency and underscore that by despatching assistance to other affected areas. Natural disasters also pay no heed to the presence of security bases, battleships, cantonments and alas, nuclear installations, compounding every security threat manifold.

Disasters might in fact be described as security challenges. Recent scholarship includes ecological threats under the rubric of security; where environmental degradation causes disasters, by that logic, they are a security problem. On the other hand, the consequences of disasters create security problems in multiple ways whether through the economic pressure created by refugee flows, or the reconfiguration of landscapes, or the destruction of military facilities. Moreover, the frequent use of army, navy and air force resources for disaster relief underscores the disaster-security equation.

Disasters share with conventional security crises several characteristics. With the best technology and intelligence, they still catch us by surprise every time and just as we always prepare for the last terror strike we experience, we prepare for the last disaster and not the next. They present dramatic ruptures at the individual, community and state levels, and disasters and conflicts alike illustrate how human actions, threats and vulnerabilities form a continuum or spectrum across these levels. The consequences of disasters and conventional security are both designated complex emergencies, with death, destruction and displacement being complicated by administrative crises, economic loss and the breakdown of order in everyday situations.

A series of terrible disasters hitting South Asia practically on-camera in the last decade, have raised our awareness of issues and challenges in disaster settings. We are also beginning to recognise the limitations of our responses, and that we do not seem to learn from our mistakes. A similar learning needs to happen with regard to security.

What could be some of these lessons that we learn, based on what disasters teach us? First, human beings, individually and collectively, belong at the core of any thinking about security, just as they do at the core of disaster mitigation and management. Second, you cannot secure one set of human beings while placing others at risk. Security, in any context, is truly indivisible. Third, just as collaborative and cooperative action improves the chances of mitigating disasters and minimising their impact, so do they improve the security environment for individuals and communities. Fourth, just as disasters are best mitigated by governance processes that are democratic, accountable and responsive, so in fact are security threats. In neither case does this mean that action should faithfully follow the rising and falling tides of popular opinion but that informed and thoughtful public engagement with policy is desirable. Finally, the destruction wrought by disasters represents an opportunity for creating a new, better society rather than fashioning a xerox copy of the old. A good security dispensation is one that serves all (or the preponderant number of) individuals and communities equally well, and so security crises, conventional and non-traditional, reflect failure and represent openings for renegotiating relationships, recrafting rules and redesigning the structures of a society and polity.

Endnotes

The Global Fund for Women (GFW). 2005. Caught in the Storm: The Impact of Natural Disasters on Women. (December) Accessible athttp://www.globalfundforwomen.org/downloads/
disaster-report.pdf
Oxfam. 2005. The tsunami’s impact on women. Oxfam Briefing Note. March. Accessible at http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what_we_do/issues/conflict_
disasters/downloads/bn_tsunami_women.pdf.
World Health Organization. Department of Injuries and Violence Prevention. 2005. Violence and disasters. Accessible athttp://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/
publications/violence/violence_disasters.pdf.
The State of the World’s Refugees 2006: Human displacement in the new
millennium. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, pages 26-28.
After the Storm: Rethinking International Engagement in Post-Cyclone Burma, East-West Center, June 12, 2008,http://www.eastwestcenter.org/ewc-in-washington/
events/previous-events-2008/june-12-2008-clapp-kaung-steinberg/; Post-Nargis Analysis–The Other Side of the Story, October 2008, Accessible athttp://www.dhf.uu.se/pdffiler/burma_post_nargi_analysis.pdf
Kelman, Ilan. Disaster Diplomacy. Radix Online. ; Chaitanya—The Policy Consultancy. 2005. Post-Tsunami International Relations: A Sea Change?Chaitanya Brief. Volume I Number 2 (June 24). Accessible athttp://www.chaitanyaconsult.in/chaitanya/cb/cbI2.pdf.

(Swarna Rajagopalan is a Chennai-based political scientist specialising in security, broadly defined. She is the founder of Prajnya Initiatives for Peace, Justice and Security, a new Chennai non-profit (http://www.prajnya.in))

Violence against women and security

Published in InfochangeIndia.org on November 25, 2008

As the Violence Against Women fortnight kicks off internationally on November 25,Swarna Rajagopalan analyses why women’s physical survival and safety must be viewed as a security issue and why violence against women is as much a social concern as war, famine or terrorism

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there is consensus that something important has shifted in the real world that necessitates a shift in security thinking.

It is now acknowledged that more wars take place within States than across them. State-building has been identified as a leading source of insecurity (for States by some, for everyone by others). Famine on a large scale challenges the survival of societies; as do disasters that can disrupt the fabric of social relationships. Climate change threatens small island-states like the Maldives, whose new president is now shopping for land to resettle his people in anticipation that the atoll-state will be consumed by rising sea-levels.

Those who write on non-traditional security admit migration and trafficking into their research agendas, understanding that these challenge the very foundations of the nation-state system. Struggles over land, livelihood and food are also now recognised as admissible into this agenda in the same way as militancy is. The reconstruction of society after a conflict, somewhere at the conjunction of the old nation-building and development agendas, is also accepted as a security subject.

This catholic embrace stops short of women’s bodies. Violence against women is still not quite a security issue, unless it occurs in the context of one of the above situations or a traditional security crisis. Common, garden variety threats to the physical survival and safety of women are where the line is drawn, either out of an ingrained sense that home and person are not appropriate objects of interest for this field or as a compromise in the face of the protest that no field can include everything.

As a prelude to analysing this discourse that excludes women’s physical survival and safety, let us take a quick look at some of the things we include under the ‘violence against women’ (henceforth, VAW) rubric. Women experience physical insecurity both by virtue of their position within a given socio-economic structure and by virtue of where they find themselves physically.

Patriarchal societies value women first and foremost as mothers. Maternal health is therefore a useful point of departure for this review. A Unicef report states that one woman dies every five minutes of a pregnancy-related complication.(1) One in every 70 women is at risk of dying from pregnancy-related causes and the risk is even greater for women below 24.(2) The Maternal Mortality Ratio for Indian women is estimated at anywhere between 300 and 500 per 100,000 live births, depending on the source you consult.

Debates over the woman’s right to choose versus the foetus’s right to be born are entering Indian discourse, obscuring the continuum between a prenatal death sentence by virtue of sex and the woman’s lack of reproductive autonomy. In India, statistics about sex selective abortions begin with the dramatic figure of about 10 million such abortions being performed over the last quarter-century and end with the horrific count of 3 million female foetuses being aborted annually. Both the right of the girl-child to be born and the long-term consequences for women and society are the issue here.

Discrimination in matters of nutrition, healthcare and schooling apart, girls in situations of poverty are at risk of trafficking and early marriage. A majority of girls become victims of trafficking at a very early age, and about 35% of them blamed their families for their fate. Families are also responsible for forcing girls into early marriages. More than half of India’s girls marry before 18, and experience much greater risk of pregnancy-related complications as well as domestic violence. Add to this the threat of child sexual abuse, mostly at the hands of family members, and Indian girls do not seem to lead very secure lives.

A serious impediment to simple improvements in a girl’s life is the threat of street sexual harassment. Being followed on the way to school, cat-calls at the bus-stop, being groped or pinched on a bus or being stalked foreshadow sexual violence. The threat of being harassed intimidates girls and, in a society that places a premium on virginity, persuades parents to stop their schooling at puberty. Lacking education, confidence or self-esteem, the girl has no inner defences against exploitation and society provides no external protections either.

Marriage is seen as a solution to the problem of protecting a girl from the dangers of the public arena. Dowry, however, is one of the core causes of male-child preference. The practice of demanding and giving dowries has been spreading to communities where it was hitherto unknown. Dissatisfaction and avarice have combined to create social conditions where over 6,000 girls lose their lives annually in dowry-related deaths, according to the NCRB.(3) Strict laws do not seem to deter families from demanding nor from feeling like their prestige is attached to giving.

A shamefully large percentage of Indian women experience domestic violence. Nearly 37% of married women have experienced violence at some point and, perhaps more alarming, 54% of Indian women believe husbands have the right to beat their wives, according to the National Family Health Survey.(4) Social and economic compulsions keep women in abusive marriages and, given the magnitude of the problem, there are still too few helplines and shelters.

Infamous advice from India’s mythical lawgiver, Manu, enjoins women to seek the protection of their fathers, husbands and sons. Where fathers and husbands fail women, sons often do so as well. The abandoned widows of Brindavan and Varanasi are only the most dramatic instance of the cruelty of Indian society towards its elders. In homes around the country, senior citizens, particularly elderly, widowed women, are often subject to neglect and emotional abuse. Where cultural mores still constrain many from actually abandoning their ageing parents, what seniors surveyed described as ‘disrespect’ in fact borders on physical abuse.

This random review illustrates how unsafe women are in a variety of settings and roles. Considering that they constitute almost half a population of 1 billion, why does the survival and well-being of nearly 500 million citizens not find a place in security agendas?

One reason is the binary view of the public and private spheres which security as a field inherits from traditional political philosophy. On the contrary, feminists argue that the personal is political. The contemporary exercise (reflected in this series of articles) of redefining security is the search for a middle ground between these positions. Somewhere between a social perspective that will not cross the threshold of a home or a relationship and one that would dismiss the distance between the two sides of the threshold, is an older political debate relating to personal freedom and privacy. How do we define where the limits lie in the relationship between the individual and the collective? Once crossed, what is an appropriate issue for intervention and what is off-limits?

New security thinking has added a plethora of new referents for ‘security’ (a confounding plethora, traditionalists might say). That is, when we ask the question ‘whose security,’ we now answer with a much longer list than ‘State’ or ‘nation-state.’ Moreover, when we ask who creates insecurity, security scholars or policymakers shy away less from adding the State itself to the list. However, our view of who should create security still somehow ends up being State-centric.

This blindsides us. Where we will not let the State step in, whether from a minimalist State perspective or otherwise, we still challenge its inaction (and its inability to act). Can the State enter kitchens in an anticipatory exercise to prevent kerosene from being poured over new brides? Can the State be a presence in the bedroom when a wife is repeatedly raped by her husband? Should the State uphold the mother’s right to choose to have a child or should it allow her to decide not to have a girl-child?

Some of these questions have been resolved in practice. The Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act, 1994 is an example, as is the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2006. But their failure to completely stop the practices they condemn suggests that even a State with tremendous reach, awesome enforcement capability and reasonable political will cannot stop individuals from perpetrating violent acts sanguinely. Neighbours, extended family and alert local civil society organisations can go much further than a battery of laws and a police force. Social pressure and ostracism are greater deterrents than the likelihood that the victim or her supporters will term their experience as ‘abuse’ and report it to the police. Those who mistreat women must take comfort in the lack of social support options available to them, so that they must return to the site of abuse sooner or later.

The next frontier in this exercise of re-imagining security then is to explore the role of civil society in creating security (and insecurity). Citizen-driven initiatives are the order of the day with regard to most other issues, be it mohalla committees to preserve communal harmony or neighbourhood environmental groups like EXNORA. What is the scope for citizen action to create security for women within and outside the home? What ethical and political issues are involved with initiating such action? Realistic assessments of what can be achieved are also needed, for which documentation of existing civil society efforts is important.

There is another factor: cultural relativism and the reluctance of contemporary State and society in an age of political correctness. Patriarchal politics makes of women’s bodies easy shorthand for the politics of group identity. Women then carry the burden of socialisation, cultural preservation and physically standing for the community’s integrity and survival. If attacks on women are an easy way of expressing hostility towards a community, restrictions on women are a way for the community to articulate its borders—“We are X-Y-Z and therefore we require this or that of our women.” The rationale is ‘protection’—of the women, ergo, the community. A strange liberal inhibition prevents us from completely challenging these for fear of offending others or limiting the right of each community to define itself uniquely. Eggshell-walking and dogma are both inimical to an idea of security that is equitable as well as liberal.

Why would we want to include violence against women in the security agenda? The most obvious reason is a political argument that anything that affects the survival of such a large part of society belongs in any discussion about survival and well-being. Second, using the term ‘security’ adds political leverage to any issue—visibility is greater, resources flow more easily and a sense of urgency is generated that may otherwise be lacking. Third, where violence is involved, collective attention and consideration are a must, and whether it is the State or society, it is imperative that one kind of violence merits the same attention as another. We cannot choose to which category of violence we will pay attention on the basis of motivation or victim identity.

Arguments can also be made that link violence against women to larger consequences for society and State. Unbalanced sex ratios increase the likelihood of violence in society. Violence against women has epidemic qualities that place a large burden on the public health system. Fewer adults able to work optimally and children desensitised to violence are other consequences. However, these instrumental arguments—take care of this so you can move on and do other things—are less persuasive than the argument that the security of female citizens is intrinsically a good thing and as much a social concern as war, famine or terrorism.

From intellectual and political standpoints, a discussion about violence against women as insecurity raises very interesting questions. Are there drawbacks to ‘securitising’ violence against women? Who will act to assure their security? What can we say about the relationship between State, society and female citizens based on the level of willingness to take action on this issue? Violence against women and women’s security also provides another instance for debating the freedom versus security, private versus public, universal versus relativist and minimalist versus pro-active State binaries that are actually among the oldest questions in politics. Thus, what we have been calling an exercise of redefinition or re-imagining ‘security’ is in fact also an exercise of remembering those fundamental political questions revisiting which is a pre-requisite to alert, vigilant citizenship.

Endnotes

Roopa Bakshi, Maternal Mortality – a woman dies every 5 minutes in childbirth in India, UNICEF India, http://www.unicef.org/india/health_1341.htm.
UNICEF. India. Statistics. accessed athttp://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/india_statistics.html, on November 3, 2008.
Sample Registration System, Maternal Mortality In India: 1997-2003: Trends, Causes And Risk Factors, Registrar General, India, New Delhi, 2006. Accessed athttp://ideas.repec.org/p/ess/wpaper/id753.html on November 3, 2008. UNICEF. India. Statistics. accessed at http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/india_statistics.html, on November 3, 2008.
P M Kulkarni, Estimation Of Missing Girls At Birth And Juvenile Ages In India, UNFPA, September 2007, Page 16. Accessed atHttp://Www.Unfpa.Org/Gender/Docs/Studies/Missingirlsatbirth_India.Pdf on November 3, 2008.
P M Nair, A Report on Trafficking in Women and Children in India 2002-2003, Volume 1, NHRC-UNIFEM-ISS, 2004, page 104, Accessed athttp://nhrc.nic.in/Documents/ReportonTrafficking.pdf on November 16, 2008.
Centre for Social Research, Child Marriage Prohibition Act openly flouted, as the practice continues unabated, Press Release, February 1, 2008, Accessed athttp://www.csrindia.org/Child%20Marriage%20Prohibition%2
0Act%20openly%20flouted,%20as%20the% 20practice%20continues%20unabated
%20,New%20Delhi,%2001%20February%202008.htm on November 16, 2008.
National Crime Records Bureau 2006.
National Family Health Survey 3, 2005-2006,National Fact Sheet India, Accessed athttp://www.nfhsindia.org/pdf/IN.pdf, on November 16, 2008.

Monday, November 3, 2008

Two nuns, two Indias and the politics of identity

Swarna Rajagopalan, Through their bodies we strive, New Indian Express, November 3, 2008.

(Also available here.)

In October, two Catholic nuns from India made news.

First, news broke about the gang rape of a nun in Kandhamal on August 25, 2008. Her rape was part of the anti-Christian mob frenzy that followed the killing of Lakshmananda Saraswati. She was dragged out of her hiding-place, raped and paraded naked in the market-place. She alleges that the police were watching and did nothing. Neither did others in the marketplace.

Second, Sister Alphonsa was canonized and India celebrated. Saint Alphonsa’s miracles were remembered and her followers and faithful interviewed, as we watched the Vatican ceremony live. Those who had never heard of Alphonsa before that day now know a great deal about her, her hometown, her miracle and her schoolfriends.

Within us, live two Indias.

The first India I know is that of my great-grandmother, walking down from her home to pray at “Alphonso kovil” in the neighbourhood, a ritual we continued on every visit to Chennai. The nun from Kerala, her contemporary, became a much-loved part of our family pantheon.

The second India, also somewhere within many of us, has responded to communal violence against Christians in Orissa and Karnataka in a shamefully muted way. It is petulant about the pride we felt collectively at Alphonsa’s canonization, pointing out that India has other women saints.

But this article is not about my family, communalism or ‘Indias,’ old and new. It is about the way in which women become the currency or the medium through which we transact or express identity politics. In October, what the Orissa nun and Saint Alphonsa had in common is that their lives and stories were drawn into political battles far removed from their own experiences.

Women, their bodies and their lives are too often gadgets deployed in political struggles over delineating what defines a national (or local) community and what relationship each part of society shall bear to this whole.

The symbols of the group are cast as women, whether as Mother India, Britannica, Thamizhthai or Rosie the Riveter, inspiring the group to act upon its self-definition. The symbol is given attributes—a nurturing temperament, the spirit of battle, divinity, chastity, sacrifice, discipline—that are then extrapolated onto women in the group. This works, first, to stereotype women in the group; they are uniformly nurturing, feisty, adventurous, chaste, and so on. Then it serves as a moral code for women, laying out do’s and don’ts for them of dress and behaviour. Expressing the group’s values, these become custom, ritual and norm, into which all the members of a group are socialized and to which they are expected to conform. Women, who live this code, become its first teachers; prisoners becoming jailers, one might say. Transgressions of this code are punishable by the group, physically, through shaming or ostracism. These codes also assure that when Mother India and Rosie the Riveter are done with their work of inspiring the troops, they can return to the private sphere to live and teach the group’s code.

Because women come to embody the group, its values and the continuity of the code that defines it, they are the most effective target for its opponents. Historical and contemporary case studies around the world show that subjugation is often expressed through sexual violence. The abduction, rape and enslavement of men and women is a common detail in accounts of most military encounters. The acquisition of concubines and wives from the enemy’s ranks is a symbol of military victory. This is what Helen of Troy ultimately stands for. The recognition of rape as a weapon of war is an acknowledgment that interpersonal acts of violence are not isolated from hostilities between groups.

‘Jauhar,’ ‘sati’ and ‘karo-kari’ all express the belief that the honour of the group (whether community, family or clan) lies in the bodies of women. Women must die rather than risk the loss of this honour which does not bind the group’s men in a similar way. (That this honour is in strange ways tied to property, inheritance and succession is the subject of another article.) Riots and mob violence pose particular threats for women and girls, because rape, especially rape by a gang, is both to act out and to express hostility and dominance. The war begins elsewhere, but is ultimately waged on and over female bodies.

Gender stereotypes, gender roles and behavioural codes have one unintended consequence. In times of conflict, they create an unexpected space for agency. Women are able to act as mothers, even when the demands of group honour restrict their movements in the name of protection. ‘Mothers’ have organized to search for missing children, to tend to the wounded, to organize supplies and to rally for peace. Where daughters, sisters and wives are confined to the so-called safe haven of the home, mothers cross its threshold into public action, time and again in Chile, in Kashmir, in Northern Ireland, in Sri Lanka and other conflict zones.

The two nuns, working in Kerala and Orissa, could have scarcely imagined that their lives would be a part of a political discussion that also evoked Mother India, Helen of Troy or the Chilean Mothers of the Disappeared. Patriarchy unrelentingly weaves them all into the politics of identity as symbols, as vectors and as battle-grounds and makes their lives currency in battles over conscience, culture and history.

Swarna Rajagopalan directs Prajnya Initiatives (www.prajnya.in).

Work as extreme sport

Swarna Rajagopalan, Going to work is fraught with great risk, New Indian Express, October 13, 2008.

Recently reported events have demonstrated that earning a living is becoming a dangerous undertaking.

The first is Saumya Vishwanathan's murder while returning from her work at a news channel late into the night. The Delhi Chief Minister acknowledged that Delhi was unsafe and then described the victim as "adventurous" for returning home by herself at that hour. Since less adventurous Bangalore call-centre employees who had office transport, met similar fates at the hands of those who were supposed to escort them safely, this comment has rightly offended many. In an earlier incident, a Chennai domestic worker was burnt alive by her (female) employer for not returning a loan and not showing up to work. The employer then tried to buy the silence of those around and inevitably got caught.

Both of these people were put at risk not by entering an adventure show or participating in combat but by simply going out to earn a living. Neither of these appears to be a gender-related crime, but the fact is that going out to earn a living is a particularly high-risk enterprise for many women.

The litany of working women's challenges is not news—unequal pay for equal work, work environments that disadvantage them by rewarding male bonding and cronyism and of course, workplace sexual harrassment.

Sexual harassment is defined by the Supreme Court as unwelcome sexual behaviour including physical contact, soliciting sexual favours, sexual comments, showing pornography and any other kind of sexual overture. What makes sexual harassment abominable is that it is not an expression of interest between equals but that the abuser leverages their power within the organization to contrive a favourable outcome. Sexual harassment also takes the form of a work environment that is uncomfortable or hostile to work in.

Since the Vishakha judgment, many organizations have created procedures for lodging and investigating complaints. But how well these work is another question, as is the ability of a victim to access them. There is also the question of abuse of these provisions.

Other challenges faced by working women relate to working conditions. A few weeks ago, when a Saravana Stores outlet caught fire, reports also emerged about the conditions in which their workers were housed and how little they were paid. They were more shocking than the safety conditions that prevailed in the store.

Getting to work and getting back from work are also fraught with risk. Street sexual harassment is a reality in every city. Walking to the bus stop, girls are accosted and propositioned. Crowded buses alone are not intrinsically dangerous, but when they are packed with male passengers who feel free to touch, pinch and fondle, the dread begins right there. Going to work on a bike is no doubt better, but the chances of being followed down quiet stretches of road remain. Company transport is not a foolproof solution either.

The patriarchal response to these challenges is protection rather than social, attitudinal transformation. What is it about our society that makes men behave like predators and what is it about our culture that practically condones it?

But when women cannot go out to work, what happens? Workplace and street safety affect livelihood security and public health.

First of all, statistics about violence within the home belie the fond hope that women and girls (or boys) are safer at home. Silences about violence within the family are arguably louder than those about workplace harassment. Lack of economic independence locks domestic violence victims in abusive relationships. The social environment is changing, but in the absence of alternative support, all the woman has is the age-old advice to 'adjust' to her situation.

Working women contribute to the household income, and when that income falls, nutrition levels fall, first affecting women and girl children. Weak, undernourished women give birth to weak, low birth-weight children. Low birth-weight children remain sickly throughout their lives, burdening their families and ultimately, society with the cost of keeping them in good health and compensating for their inability to work.

The inability of women to contribute to the household income further devalues the girl child, reinforcing the attitudes that encourage sex-selective abortion. The idea that girls are a burden also results in their forced marriage or even sale to traffickers, to say nothing of her not earning money towards her wedding.

Education and employment empower, but if going to work is a risk-taking enterprise, where does that leave us?

The Chennai domestic worker probably took a loan from her employer because no one else would give her one. The job, the loan and failure to repay the loan were probably all factors beyond control. Neither that nor absence from work deserve the death penalty.

Saumya Vishwanath was a bright, dedicated professional. Whether male or female, and even in our notoriously unsafe national capital, her commute should have been safe.

As with so many other things, in discussing safety and work, our instinct is to punish women by restricting their movement rather than to proactively seek and punish those who cause harm to them. It is not a perfect universe, and people have to be careful, but how long will society and its ruling elite hide behind these admonitions? How long will we accept them as a substitute for firm action to make cities and workspaces safe? When will we go beyond protection and punishment towards re-engineering social attitudes towards women?

Swarna Rajagopalan directs Prajnya Initiatives. http://www.prajnya.in