The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog

Women’s Bodies: Violence, Security, Capabilities - Part III

Note: This is the third in a series of posts, the whole of which is an article by Martha Nussbaum. The article, entitled "Women’s Bodies: Violence, Security, Capabilities," appeared in the Journal of Human Development (Vol. 6, No. 2, July 2005).  Comments are encouraged on parts or on the whole.

Violence and women’s capabilities
Let us now consider the impact of these varied forms of violence, and the threat of them, on women’s capabilities. Since I have defended a particular list of capabilities as the basis for an account of fundamental human entitlements or rights that should, I argue, be adopted in the constitutions of all nations (Nussbaum, 2000, pp. 78–80), let us look at what violence does to the items on the list. Life is easy enough: many women are murdered in the course of sexual violence. In wartime and communal conflict this happens in large numbers. It has been estimated, for example, that about one-half of the 2000 Muslims murdered in Gujarat, India, were women who were raped and tortured, then set on fire (Nussbaum, 2004a). Similar things have happened recently on a large scale in many nations, including Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and Columbia. Women also lose their lives through violence at the hands of spouses or partners: in the United States in 2000, 1247 women were killed by an intimate partner (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1993–2001). The transmission of HIV during intercourse with a partner, often without full disclosure and consent, is another form of lethal violence, extremely widespread in Africa. Trafficking and forced prostitution frequently lead to death, often through HIV/AIDS. And of course, sex-selective abortion and infanticide, together with the undernutrition of girls, are major causes of female death around the world. Honor killings and killings in connection with dowry are also still in some places a depressing reality.

Women’s Bodies: Violence, Security, Capabilities - Part II

Note: This is the second in a series of posts, the whole of which is an article by Martha Nussbaum. The article, entitled "Women’s Bodies: Violence, Security, Capabilities," appeared in the Journal of Human Development (Vol. 6, No. 2, July 2005).  Comments are encouraged on parts or on the whole.

Violence against women: the data

One thing we know for sure about any data on violence against women is that they are inaccurate, since one of the most notorious effects of such violence is to produce a reluctance on the part of women to report such crimes, and in many cases even to perceive what has occurred as crime, rather than as woman’s unpleasant fate. With that starting point held firmly in mind, we can mention a very small number of the data that have by now been gathered. The Human Development Report 2000 finds that between 10% and 47% of women (in nine countries studied) report being physically assaulted by an intimate partner (United Nations Development Programme, 2000, p. 36). A total 500 000 women a year are trafficked out of Eastern and Central Europe; in Asia around 250 000 people, mostly women and children, are trafficked every year. Between 85 and 115 million girls and women have undergone some form of female genital mutilation, and approximately two million more young girls undergo it. In Pakistan alone, the Human Rights Commission reported more than 1000 honor killings of women in a single year. Data on rape in the Human Development Report 2000 are obviously inadequate: most nations do not report any figures, and the figures that are reported are so low, and so capriciously varying, as to make them altogether unbelievable. (It thus seems highly unlikely that there are almost three times as many rapes in Canada as in the United States; that rape is four times more common in Estonia than in the United States; that Canada has 90 times more rapes per unit of population than Japan and 80 times as many as Italy; that Estonia has the highest rape ratio in the world by a factor of almost two to one over the runner-up, Canada; and so forth.)

Women’s Bodies: Violence, Security, Capabilities - Part I

Note: This is the first in a series of posts, the whole of which is an article by Martha Nussbaum. The article, entitled "Women’s Bodies: Violence, Security, Capabilities," appeared in the Journal of Human Development (Vol. 6, No. 2, July 2005).  Comments are encouraged on parts or on the whole.

Women’s Bodies: Violence, Security, Capabilities

by Martha C. Nussbaum

Violence and the threat of violence

No woman in the world is secure against violence. Throughout the world, women’s bodies are vulnerable to a range of violent assaults that include domestic violence, rape within marriage, rape by acquaintances or dates, rape by strangers, rape in wars and communal conflicts, honor killing, trafficking and forced prostitution, child sexual abuse, female infanticide, female genital mutilation, and sex-selective abortion. Other practices that are not as obviously violent also contribute to the atmosphere of threat in which all women live the entirety of their lives: sexual harassment, stalking, threats of violence, deprivation of bodily liberty, the undernutrition of girls. The United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (1994) defines violence against women as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life.” Consequently, many apparently nonviolent practices count as forms of violence — and they should so count, because they have the same crippling effects on women’s capabilities as actual bodily violence.

India: A Democracy’s Near Collapse into Religious Terror, Part VI

The struggle to be investigated is not confined to India: the Hindu right has a powerful and wealthy U.S. arm, which both funds suspicious activities in India, possibly activities associated with Gujarat’s genocidal violence, and foments discord here and in Britain.  Much of the animus of the U. S. group has focused on scholars.  Colleagues here in the United States have been threatened with physical violence, even death, or had eggs thrown at them, when they tell a version of long-ago history that does not suit the agenda of the Hindu right.  Representatives of the Hindu right have made serious, though unsuccessful, attempts to have American universities remove troublesome scholars from assignments involving the teaching of ancient Hindu traditions.  Although I myself have been verbally attacked at times, and although my Dean had one phone call saying that I had no right to teach, the odd thing about the nature of these attacks in America is that a person like me who writes about a genocide today, saying that the Hindu right is complicit in the murders of thousands, is less likely to be targeted than someone who writes about mythology or ancient history in ways that contravene the new orthodoxy.  Part of the story of my book on this subject will involve unraveling the complicated connections between the Hindu right in India and the expatriate community in the United States, which surely need careful scrutiny and further inquiry. whatever one’s political and religious views may be. 

India: A Democracy’s Near Collapse into Religious Terror, Part V

One way of understanding the choices before India today is to think of the nation’s choice of national anthems.  At the time of Independence, and ever since, two different poems have been competing for this coveted spot.  The losing candidate in 1947, now vociferously championed, once again, by the Hindu Right, is a song known as “Bande Mataram,” “Hail Motherland,” written by the Bengali novelist Bankimchandra Chatterjee.  Chatterjee himself was a complex figure, and he may or may not be endorsing the sentiments of his song, which occurred in one of his novels.  But the song, quickly taken up by the nationalist movement of the early twentieth century, portrays Indian identity in a manner strongly influenced by Western romantic European patriotism, as a matter of adoring the motherland, and being prepared to shed one’s blood in her cause:

India: A Democracy’s Near Collapse into Religious Terror, Part IV

Anyone who wants to understand today’s India needs to approach the nation with open eyes and curiosity, looking to see the variety that is there, rather than to judge prematurely that a given custom or idea is the “real” India and another one less “authentic.”   Such artificial ideas of purity and authenticity are not only misleading, they are also the very ideas that have been exploited politically by the Hindu right in trying to cast non-Hindus as alien polluters of the national fabric.  They know that they find a receptive audience in America, since Americans (in addition to their widespread suspiciousness about Muslims) are currently very guilty about the legacy of colonialism, and thus all too inclined to accept the fiction of a pure unsullied “other” that was polluted by external forces.   Usually such fictions mask a history that was always divided, contentious, and heterogeneous.  Many of the painful struggles over the teaching of history in today’s India concern just such soothing but deeply misleading fictions of the past.  One cannot understand the current political debate if one begins from the position of romantic nationalism that the Hindu right has expended so much energy in marketing. 

India: A Democracy’s Near Collapse into Religious Terror, Part III

I write not only to present a case study in the threat to democracy from religious tension, not only to engage Americans in an informed dialogue about India, but also to defuse the inaccurate and unhelpful assumption that Islam is a global monolith bent on violence.   When people talk of the “clash of civilizations,” or opine that Islam is not compatible with democracy, I find that (quite apart from their omission of Turkey and Lebanon) they typically know little about South Asia. (“South Asia” is the term usually used to refer to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and sometimes Indonesia and Malaysia; it is distinct from “Southeast Asia,” the term that refers to Myanmar, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, etc. One sign of this general ignorance: My c.v. mentions that I am a member of my university’s Committee on Southern Asian Studies.  When I am introduced for lectures, it is very common that the introducer changes this to “Southeast Asian Studies,” as if it was always fine to substitute a familiar term for an unfamiliar one.)   Few know, for example, that Bangladesh is a thriving, if poor, Muslim-majority democracy (about 85% Muslim), with democratic self-government, two energetic women who lead the two major parties, a strongly pro-woman official policy, and a constitution that protects fundamental rights very strongly, similar to India’s constitution.  Its national anthem, “Amar Sonar Bangla” (“My Golden Bengal”) is a song written by Hindu Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore.  As Amartya Sen says, “This must be very confusing to those who see the contemporary world as a ‘clash of civilizations’ – with ‘the Muslim civilization,’ ‘the Hindu civilization,’ and ‘the Western civilization,’ each forcefully confronting the others.” (Amartya Sen, “Tagore and His India,” The New York Review of Books June 26, 1997, 55-63.)

India: A Democracy’s Near Collapse into Religious Terror, Part II

India's story is of intrinsic interest and importance.  By following the story of Gujarat, Americans can begin to understand better than most currently do the political and religious dynamics of the world's most populous democracy, a nuclear power, and a nation that will play an increasingly large role on the world stage.  India is typically not well covered by the U. S. media or by education in U. S. schools and colleges.  Indian scholars who have written extremely well about their own situation, in books and articles and in a national press that is admirable for its quality and its openness, have little name-recognition in the U. S. and are rarely read. During the ascendancy of the Hindu right, when intelligent diplomatic pressure could have achieved change, U. S. foreign policy was largely indifferent to internal tensions in India, focusing only on the threat of nuclear conflict with Pakistan.   American ignorance of India's history and current situation was largely to blame for such omissions.   Americans typically follow events in the Middle East rather closely.  If one wants to know about Israeli-Palestinian relations, for example, ample material for such an understanding is readily available from daily newspapers, television, and the internet.  India is simply not as "present" to the American mind, because it is not as present in the American media.  Thus India's own struggle with religious extremism is little known, and the lessons it can teach us are little appreciated.

India: A Democracy’s Near Collapse into Religious Terror

While Americans have been focused on the war on terror, Iraq, and the future of democracy in the Middle East, democracy has been under siege in another part of the world. India -- the most populous of all democracies, and a country whose Constitution protects human rights even more comprehensively than our own -- has been in crisis. Until the spring of 2004, its parliamentary government was increasingly controlled by right-wing Hindu extremists who condone and in some cases actively support violence against minorities, especially the Muslim minority. Many seek a fundamental change in India's pluralistic democracy. Despite their recent electoral loss, these political groups and the social organizations allied with them remain extremely powerful. The political future is unclear.