India
India: Rajasthan - women accused of witchcraft - draft law
.thumbnail.jpg "Across Rajasthan, mentally ill, widowed, infertile or old women are declared witches and subjected to brutal forms of torture.")
Nimera, Jaipur (Women's Feature Service) - Vimla Devi, 39, was preparing to go to bed when she heard loud bangs on her door. Her heart sank. At 9 p.m., everyone in Nimera village, 25 kilometres from the state capital of Jaipur, had already settled down for the night. Piercing the calm came the shouts of men wielding 'lathis' (sticks) and trying to break down Vimla's door: "We will kill this woman today," they shouted. Inside the house, Vimla and her two children shuddered with fear.
Prostitutes of God
In Prostitutes of God, VBS travels deep into the remote villages and towns of Southern India to uncover an ancient system of religious sex slavery dating back to the 6th century. Although the practice was made illegal more than 20 years ago, we discover there are still more than 23,000 women in the state of Karnataka selling their bodies in the name of the mysterious Hindu Goddess Yellamma. They are known as Devadasis, or ‘servants of God’. From city red light districts to rural mud huts, we meet proud brothel madams, HIV positive teenage prostitutes, and gay men in saris. Our intimate exploration into the life of the Devadasi reveals a pseudo-religious system that exploits poverty-stricken families to fuel modern India’s booming sex trade.
Negotiating Gender Justice, Contesting Discrimination: Mapping Strategies that Intersect Culture, Women and Human Rights
This report documents diverse strategies adopted by community groups in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia and Nepal to negotiate women’s rights in the context of culture, while grounding the strategies in the specific political - historic local and national contexts. It looks at secular strategies along with the more recent responses to fundamentalism, that use cultural identity and religious/ cultural resources. The report provides a rich account initiatives that promote culture as relational, transforming, plural and accommodating of women’s rights, and in doing so, challenges dominant static and fundamentalist assertions of culture. This documentation assumes significance in relation to human rights with the creation of the new mandate of the Independent Expert in the field of Cultural Rights in 2009, in that it gives content to the term cultural diversity and participation and contribution to cultural life, both integral part of Cultural Rights.
Rights in Intimate Relationships: Towards an Inclusive and Just Framework of Women's Rights and the Family
The resource book ‘Rights in Intimate Relationships’ seeks to understand rights in intimate relationships within a framework that recognizes rights for all women regardless of their sexuality, marital status, or legality of relationship. In proposing a framework based on ‘intimate relationships’ it moves beyond the boundaries of the exclusivist, marriage centric framework of conjugality in the law. The resource book examines customary and contemporary non normative initimacies in rural and urban India from a feminist perspective, relies upon constitutional, comparative and human rights law, to explore a transformatory rights agenda in respect of the family.
Orders can be placed with PLD
India: One wife, multiple husbands - a custom fades
Buddhi Devi, 70, was betrothed as a teenager to two brothers in a polyandrous marriage in Malang, India. The custom has not carried over to her five children.
India: Prosecute Rampant ‘Honor’ Killings
(New York) July 18, 2010 -- The Indian government should urgently investigate and prosecute those responsible for the recent spurt in reported "honor" killings, Human Rights Watch said today. The government should also strengthen laws that protect against kinship, religion-based, and caste-based violence, and take appropriate action against local leaders who endorse or tolerate such crimes, Human Rights Watch said.
Murders to protect family or community "honor" have increased in recent months, in the northern states of Haryana, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh, where unofficial village councils, called khap panchayats, issue edicts condemning couples for marrying outside their caste or religion and condemn marriages within a kinship group (gotra), considered incestuous even though there is no biological connection. To enforce these decrees and break up such relationships, family members have threatened couples, filed false cases of abduction, and killed spouses to protect the family's "honor." Some local politicians and officials have been sympathetic to the councils' edicts, implicitly supporting the violence.
"Officials who fail to condemn village council edicts that end in murder are effectively endorsing murder," said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director for Human Rights Watch. "Politicians and police need to send these councils a strong message to stop issuing edicts on marriages."
In India, Castes, Honor and Killings Intertwine
KODERMA, India — When Nirupama Pathak left this remote mining region for graduate school in New Delhi, she seemed to be leaving the old for the new. Her parents paid her tuition and did not resist when she wanted to choose her own career. But choosing a husband was another matter.
Her family was Brahmin, the highest Hindu caste, and when Ms. Pathak, 22, announced she was secretly engaged to a young man from a caste lower than hers, her family began pressing her to change her mind. They warned of social ostracism and accused her of defiling their religion.
A Female Approach to Peacekeeping
MONROVIA, LIBERIA — When darkness comes to Congo Town, women in crisp uniforms take the streets, patrolling with Kalashnikov rifles and long, black hair tucked into baby-blue caps.
India: Women Advocate Against Honour Killings & For Free Choice Marriages
New Delhi - Honour killings in north India are making the headlines with sickening regularity. The unexplained death of Nirupama Pathak in her Jharkhand home is just one incident.
India: Single Women Resist Stigma - Demand Rights
India - Single Women Resist Stigma, Demand Rights
By: Swapna Majumdar
Correspondent - January 10, 2010