- The country woke up to the news of the unfortunate death by suicide of an engineer based in Bengaluru due to allegations of harassment by his estranged wife and her family. The detailed note that he left behind and the video explaining the drastic decision to end life must have sent a chill down the spine of the countrymen. The largely patriarchal, misogynistic, and male-chauvinist society must have felt a strong foreboding of how the tables are turned in the instant case when a man alleged harassment from a woman. The moot point to ponder over here is whether the existing laws of the country are too favourable for women but do not sufficiently consider men could be subjected to harassment on domestic violence issues. Let’s dwelve into this conundrum.
PC: LiveLaw
- The suicide has underscored several concerns about the functioning of the law and legal systems in India. However, instead of addressing the systemic issues that affect both the survivors and perpetrators of domestic violence (DV), the narrative is steeped in deeply reductionist men vs women debates and generalized tropes about how women are misusing the law and blaming the women’s agency and empowerment for the dismantling of the institution of marriage. Make no mistake, it’s a fact that all laws have the potential to be misused, and no legal system is infallible. It’s equally relevant to know that most crimes in India do not end with a conviction, and that does not mean they were all false/fake cases or meant to misuse the law.
PC: Kashmir Observer
- It’s no secret that structural reasons behind low conviction rates in India such as lack of quality legal aid, hostile witnesses, familial pressure – especially on women and children to withdraw the case – flawed police investigation, and so on. Worryingly, these reasons are not recorded by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), the national quantitative crime database upon which most proponents of misuse of laws rely. Further, NCRB data has several methodological errors that can be used to propagate the narrative of misuse, especially against women using domestic laws. As the data of six years (2017 to 2022) reveals, more women (25,197) than men (21,579) have died by suicide due to marriage-related issues.
PC: Sahodar
- And 52.5% of all female suicide victims in 2022 were housewives. Nonetheless, it is often claimed that more married men die by suicide because of false domestic violence cases. There is no category of suicide due to false DV cases in the NCRB. The category of marriage-related issues includes non-settlement of marriage, extra-marital affairs, dowry-related issues, divorce, etc. It is family problems, not related to marriage, that constitute the biggest cause of suicide for men here from 2017 to 2022, forming 30.8% of total suicides by men as compared to marriage-related issues (3.4%). As the Bengaluru case has shown, often the highly publicized media trials erase all the nuances of complex social issues with sweeping generalisations. This must stop forthwith.
