Know How This 60-Year-Old Walked Out Of An Abusive Relation, Now Sensitising People About Gender Violence

India is a country that continues to keep cases of violence against women under the shrouds and publically celebrates them with titles such as "goddesses" and "mothers". In most cases, the perpetrator(s) is someone known to the victim, and even more horrifyingly, they are violated within their homes. Crimes against women have been normalised to the extent that they live at risk of being violated from the womb to their tomb. As per data from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), more than 30 per cent of women have been subjected to domestic violence at some point in their lives, and nearly 75 per cent of them did not seek help from anyone.

While asking for help is facilitated within the system, its accessibility and reliability for women have always remained questionable. Shedding light on the need for a strengthened legislative system that backs victims, The Logical Indian strikes a conversation with Archana Mittal on the International Day For The Elimination Of Violence Against Women.

A survivor of domestic abuse, Archana believed that court was her only recourse after over three decades of physical and emotional abuse by her ex-husband. However, the court proceedings and trials proved to be a tiring routine that fleeced money off her since she knew little about the legal structure at the time.

Years of trials and building a life out of scratch, made her realise that gender violence is a deep-rooted problem that had to be addressed through severe legislative changes, awareness, and sensitisation. She believes that there is a need for both men and women to understand this problem right from its roots and work together to eradicate it. For this reason, she started counselling people to create a safe space for them and also crafted a petition with Change.Org to break the silence around domestic violence.

Rank Holder & State Level Player Reduced To A Case Number

Archana was what one would call an ideal student back in her school and college years. The 60-year-old was a district topper, state-level player, national scholarship holder, and a chemical engineer. These were feats that challenged most of the stereotypical thinking back then in the 1960s, as it was believed that "women were meant to be seen and not heard." At such a time, she ensured she was heard and never stopped learning.

During her engineering education, she lost her parents and was left with a void along with her three siblings. In 1984, she had to leave behind her post-graduation and take up a job, and soon after, she married a man in a love cum arranged marriage setting. Talking about the marriage, Archana said, "everything started unfolding, and it was an abusive marriage right from the word." Nobody had prepared her for what came ahead.

The family grew gradually, and the couple was blessed with a boy and a girl. Meanwhile, Archana continued to stay along despite all the bruises and emotional abuse for the sake of them and due to a lack of understanding of the idea of abuse. Domestic abuse laws had made it to the country's legal system by 2005, and until then, nobody really spoke about or discussed it in detail. So, many women like Archana were left in the dark regarding injustices happening to them and what they could do about it. Over time the "girl who was a good speaker, orator singer, started losing the will to live little by little" and became a ghost to herself.

The last straw, she says, came in 2015 when she was fighting for her life at the hospital and was going through a nervous breakdown. She was not ready to give up yet because of her children. Knowing what it is like to lose a parent, she promised herself that she would remain alive for them and do the best she could to help them live a better life. Around the same time, she also started to read and understand a lot more about abuse and the questions of "Why is it happening? What is the meaning behind all of this?" and so on. However, the more she tried to voice it out, the more people came by to silence her.

Laws That Fleece Women

When she started off, Archana was clueless about the law and the legal provisions that could possibly help her out of the situation. So after filing a First Investigation Report (FIR), she met with one lawyer after the other and kept going in circles. With the financial power resting with the man in the house, it was also challenging for her to pay them. At some point in time, due to the laws best known to the lawyers and least known to her, they began fleecing her by telling her ways to go about with the case, what to do and what not to do. Despite her education and degrees, she struggled in the courts with litigations, court dates, maintenance, and such because she lacked a legal grounding.

Now while speaking of her experience with the police and courts, Archana calls it a "torture of another order." Even with all evidence in hand, many criminal cases get quashed because it's that easy in a court to make and break evidence. So even though people keep narrating that citizens are powerful with the law by their side, the ground reality is entirely different. At the court, the case gets filed at the behest of the lawyer, and they direct every word you utter at the court. One of the biggest living examples of this is her fight for a dignified life supported by the constitution.

Solution Begins From Sensitisation

All these events struck a chord and made her step up to raise her voice against domestic abuse. Many women and men are still unaware of what constitutes "abuse" and what are the legal provisions to support them. From gaslighting to stonewalling, every third woman in a household is deemed unsafe and prone to some form of abuse. This gets clearer with the statistics that say over 50 per cent of women in the country believe that it's normal for their husbands to beat them.

Apart from directly affecting the victim, such domestic abuse cases also impact the children of the house. These kids would then carry along the trauma and scars of these incidents throughout their life. Having seen this happen in her own life, Archana says that it is equally important to sensitise children about domestic abuse, violence, financial security, and so on in a similar way as to how they are being taught Maths and English.

Currently, she's doing her bit to give back to society by offering counselling sessions to women and children undergoing trauma and abuse in their homes. She has talked to thousands of women about their experience with abuse, and their narratives showed patterns that could have been avoided if they knew what was happening to them.

Be it verbal or physical, these layers of abuse need to be peeled out to the children from a young age, and they should be taught to raise their voices. The children are the hope towards breaking the spiral of silence that has been followed over the years.

Petition For A Better Tomorrow

Her petition states that every one in three women and one in seven men experiences domestic abuse by the time they are adults and that, through her petition, she wants this data to be a thing of the past. Starting from the ground level, Archana is building an environment that ensures both parents and teachers can sensitise children and help them recognise and prevent domestic violence. Education is the way forward, and schools and home play a major role in taking this message to the children.

Under the petition titled #EducateToErase, she requests the Ministry of Education and Women and Child Welfare to introduce women's rights as a subject in schools and help students address necessary concepts from an early age. Moving ahead, she also presents suggestions to tackle Domestic Violence. Some of these include;

• Incorporating/ creating a national register for domestic abuse offenders and addressing it as an issue with the public health system.
• Making help more accessible to victims in a seamless manner. Giving a mandate to public distribution systems to have a trigger button where people can register their domestic abuse call to authorities. All these centres/places should also be equipped with helpline numbers of non-governmental numbers working for Domestic violence.
• Having trained domestic abuse health counsellors (special counsellors).
• Special tribunals in courts for fast-tracking the cases and having gender-neutral laws (men and women both can be offenders).
• Creating awareness about domestic violence from the school level (inclusive of all genders).
• Along with registering marriages, a booklet of domestic violence laws should be handed out to the couple.

On this International Day for Elimination Of Violence Against Women, The Logical Indian joins along with Archana Mittal and many other survivors like her to bring their stories forward and potentially a change within the system for a better tomorrow.

Also Read: Alarming! Over 45,000 Women Died By Suicide In 2021, Majority Of Them Were Housewives: NCRB Data