Complicit in Femicide

I wake up to my usual morning. I pour my coffee and scroll through my phone.

Another girl. Another hashtag.

These are the women who become the names for the nameless. For the hundreds and thousands who didn’t quite make the headlines, these women will tell their stories too. But this is not just Sana’s story, it is also the story of yet another man who couldn’t tolerate the little word ‘no’. It is the story of the entitlement and accountability that we breed within our very own homes.

In what recently feels like a never-ending barrage of haunting images splashed across social media of women violently murdered, so many by their own partners, it clearly deserves more introspection. Noor Mukkadam’s case verdict felt like the first gasp of air, nearly four years into holding our breath. The public demand for justice had never felt louder, an echo of the broader systemic issues at play. But while justice may have been served for Noor, prevention remains a far and distant reality.

Femicide is a global epidemic, not unfamiliar to South Asians. If your views on femicide start and end with condemning murder, then not only is that too easy, naïve and uneducated – but also dangerous in preserving the current norms that place women’s safety and lives at risk. Until we don’t shift to a grassroot understanding, femicide will remain our normative reality.

While most of us raise our voices against murder, our very own homes tell a different story. In our society, homes with men are worthy homes; these are homes where mothers birth sons and girls become wives. Much of this is attributed to safety: men are the guardians and protectors, against other men. The weak are protected, and the protectors are nurtured. But the shadow tells a very different story; a story rampant with femicide. Like Jung believed, till we continue to deny and resist the shadow, it will continue to project itself into society. Welcome to the underbelly of patriarchy.

In order to deconstruct how the roots of femicide are interwoven into our homes we need to first debunk a significant myth we are raised with; women are unsafe around strangers; that they must stay home or be chaperoned to stay protected. But what we know from the data is that the exact opposite is statistically true. The majority of femicides are women who are murdered at the hands of an intimate partner, followed closely by someone known to them. Homicide by strangers makes up hardly 15% of all women killed globally. Let that sink in: women are in measurable fact most unsafe within their own homes. Feels almost like a betrayal to accept that this could possibly be true. We live in a culture that fiercely preaches stranger danger to women, and where it ironically feels blasphemous to admit to violations that occur within the home. The home, the emblem of safety, turns out to be the one place women are most vulnerable. How then can we look at femicide as segregated from what goes on within these four walls?

Now we might ask ourselves in disbelief how and why. The private nature of the home space makes it even more important to understand the tapestry of emotional and psychological dynamics that create this when considering prevention. How many invisible aggressions we do we normalize while we turn a blind eye to the power differential it creates. “Woh dil ka bohat acha hai, lekin ghussay ka tez hai” or “maarta hai lekin pyar bhi bohat kerta hai”. No matter what your politics or background, these expressions are familiar to all of us. But still not all men, we say.

We live in a culture of normalizing physical abuse as long as it remains within the milder range of the spectrum. It feels intuitive to assume that it would only be the physically violent that perpetuate the real risk, which is another myth that needs to be debunked. Ironically, many of these men committing femicide within their homes have no known criminal history, have long-running marriages and professional careers and are even fathering children. Reasonably ordinary lives. Not all men still echoes in the mind. The belief that there is some segregation between our men and these murderers, and our women and the ones murdered becomes an increasingly murky distinction to be made. A sizable one third of these offenders have no prior history of even domestic abuse in the relationship. With many of the precursors of what we assume would indicate this kind of violence missing, it leads to two colossal questions. Firstly, why are we not educating our children/girls about the danger they actually face at home, and how can we look out for the warning signs? And secondly, how and what is creating this kind of violence in what should be our safest of spaces with our safest of people?

What we do in fact know about femicide by intimate partners is that it is rooted in a need for psychological control or ownership over another person. It happens within a specific power dynamic when one assumes the right over another. The ultimate expression of it manifests in the right to take someone’s life when met with a lack of obedience. Does that sound a little extreme? It shouldn’t. When we preach that women need their husbands’ ijazat it comes with a significant emotional implication. Norms like this feed a dangerous pre-requisite for abuse by creating a power imbalance. There is a distinct difference between permission and consent that we need to teach our children; consent references approval for things impacting the personal boundaries of each other, while permission implies an authorization for something.

When we create any system in which hierarchy is organized by gender, race, nationality, religion and so on, we create systems of violence, always resulting in crimes against humanity. It is really that simple. Only naivety can lead us to believe that when the gap is just marginally discriminatory then it is harmless – this is the trap in which a vast majority of us fall. As an individual, women might feel very equal in terms of competence, opportunity and exposure but relationally, the power differential remains as huge as the Grand Canyon. We can empower women all we want but it is in a relational realm to men that we fall short over and over again. The poison is in the subtlety of how we treat our girls alongside our boys within the same home. When it comes to marriages we preach to our women ‘sabr kero’, ‘bardasht kero’, ‘agey bhi yehi sab ho ga’. Men on the other hand are far more likely to tell each other in the same circumstances advice such as “us ko apni aukat mein rakho” when faced with a serious marital conflict. And men displaying an equal investment in a marriage are mocked with “biwi ke thalay na lag”. Turns out while we ask women to turn the other cheek and ‘nibhao’, men are discouraged from the burden of the same responsibility.

I have the bias of a couples therapist, and resonate deeply with all attempts to make a marriage work – the trouble in our homes comes not through this, but through creating a system in which one gender is held accountable for upholding the burden of the marriage while the other faces little to no pressure or consequence. This is visible in the shame that women carry from the label of divorce which men remain largely unscathed by. Somewhere embedded deep in our psyche is the idea that a sacrificial woman is the symbol of holding families together – of holding the very fabric of society together. But it’s time to start asking the urgent question: at what cost? How many more Sania Zehras can we lose to justify this? When we shame women for having a broken marriage, then we simultaneously disempower them from being able to speak out against abuse. Not only do we then encourage women to stay and enable the abuse by tolerating it and guarding its secrecy, but we create a world in which she is far more likely to one day find herself in some kind of intimate terrorism.

While divorced men carry good-willed concern from society to help them find another partner swiftly, divorced women remain shunned in various corners. Landlords close their doors, and parents exclude children from these homes. In a world where women have historically been regarded as property, we aren’t yet free from the implicit memory of this. A divorced woman is owned by no one, no longer under her father’s realm and now separated from the man she was named to in society, quickly becoming a grave threat. A symbol of someone that might spoil all other good women. Destigmatizing divorce is critical and cannot be de-coupled from the process of tackling abuse.

In educating our children about abuse, we need to understand the dynamics ourselves first. Study after study reflects that intimate partner homicide and abuse is hallmarked by behaviours that are controlling, with jealousy and possessiveness, led by intense initial love. Ironically these traits are glorified globally but especially so in our part of the world – through cinema, theatre and literature. We need to teach our girls that being crazily pursued is not romantic, it is alarming. And our boys, that no means no – the start of the dialogue on consent. It needs to be heard that possessiveness is not synonymous with protection, and that love does not equal ownership. A relationship requiring all your time and sacrifice is not representative of dedication, but of self-abandonment. It is time to start telling stories of healthy love; of respect, mutuality, and consent – something that has been perceived as far less glorious under patriarchy.

Lets stop telling our daughters that they will only come home from their susral in a casket – our sons are listening.