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Mahesh

19/03/24 10:15 AM IST

Violence, homelessness, and women’s mental health

In News
  • The National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) presents a sobering picture of the pervasive violence against women in India.
  • Almost 30% of women between the ages of 18-49 years have experienced physical violence beginning at age 15; 6% reported sexual violence.
Major findings
  • Within a multifactorial matrix of structural barriers such as poverty and caste, violence and associated feelings of loss of agency feature prominently amongst reasons that precipitate an exit from typical relational bonds and conventional notions of home assumed to provide safety, a sense of community, and belongingness.
  • In contemporary patriarchal society, the social construct of womanhood continues to be carefully curated and enforced, confining women and their value within reproductive roles and docile submission to various forms of violence, routinely normalised and justified.
  • Madness in this context then becomes not an individuated pathology but a response to the continued violence against women.
  • Some women describe their madness as resistance, as a defiant embrace of what is taboo for women, an opportunity to break free from coerced identities and assume new personas that transcend patriarchal norms.
  • Women’s experiences of distress are often viewed through a reductionist biomedicine-dominated lens, neglecting the insidious impact of violence that women endure and absolving society of its complicity.
  • Navigating mental health and social care systems that mirror these biases, in the background of poverty and caste-based marginalisation, takes a profound toll, elevating risks of homelessness.
  • In our experience, women often encounter health systems that dismiss their lived experience, focusing largely on symptoms and diagnoses that are to be treated and eliminated. In contrast, our experience suggests that many of the manifestations of mental ill-health are embedded in the reality of adverse life events.
Measures
  • There is an urgent need, therefore, to develop comprehensive solutions based on a systematic unpacking of multiple factors and their interactions that perpetrate violence against women.
  • Recognising and compensating women for their unpaid labour in household roles and creating the space for women to find supportive networks and alternate family structures outside of typical heteronormative relationships may offer security and refuge.
  • Ensuring access to basic income, housing, and land ownership may offer economic independence and reduce vulnerability to homelessness.
  • Embedding in the education environment, a curriculum that helps growing adolescents interrogate and challenge harmful gendered norms may help foster a generation that values egalitarian norms and rejects all forms of violence against women.
  • Violence against women is one factor that may not receive enough attention in this context.
  • Instead of addressing root causes rhetorically, we should examine the complex strands surrounding mental health.
  • Prioritising a range of robust responses can better address the plurality of needs, especially for high-priority groups such as homeless women.
  • No single narrative makes for a complete response.
  • Greater exploration of phenomena and their influence on mental health, the role of intersectionality, power asymmetries, and the use of feminist standpoint theory in advancing science and ways of knowing are needed.
  • The absence of such a multifaceted approach represents the greatest lacuna.
Source- The Hindu

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