Domestic Violence in Nonmarital Intimate Relationships in India: Women's Narratives about Their Experiences and Constrained Agency

Research on sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in India predominantly focuses upon sexual violence and harassment perpetrated by strangers or child sexual abuse, while in relation to domestic violence and abuse (DVA), the overwhelming focus remains on marital relationships. The recent surge of research, feminist activism and policy attention to SGBV in India has scarcely addressed DVA within non-marital intimate relationships, in a context where such relationships are becoming more commonplace yet attract gendered risks and penalties for women/girls.

Drawing upon life/relationship history interviews with victim-survivors, this presentation will apply a gender lens to this gap by exploring the nature, forms and impact of DVA within young women’s intimate relationships in India and and victim-survivors' constrained agency in response to this violence. The findings examine how intersecting social relations of power based on gender, age, class, caste and religion shape the manifestations and impact of DVA. Additionally, dominant discourses about gender and sexuality – which intersect with caste, religion and class – also have implications for women's/girls' exercise of agency in the context of DVA as they seek to navigate and survive the interconnected interpersonal and structural violence that shapes their everyday life. This includes the ways in which intimacy – particularly across caste or religious boundaries - has increasingly become a politicised site of contestation within Hindu fundamentalist discourses about gender, family and the community.

Understanding the nature of DVA in young people’s relationships can inform much-needed understanding and recognition of this problem and the development of appropriate responses in India. Though this presentation focuses on India, it has wider implications across the Global South due to similar increases in age of marriage and demographic changes in populations of unmarried young people, as well as increasing prevalence of non-marital relationships.