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<\/p>\nWhy women stay
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The question that follows almost every dowry death is brutally simplistic – why didn\u2019t she just leave?But experts say women often remain in abusive marriages not because they fail to recognise the violence, but because leaving carries its own social punishment.\u201cOne of the most heartbreaking patterns,\u201d Verma says, \u201cis when women understand the abuse, know the legal remedies available to them, and yet return because they feel they have nowhere else to go.\u201dThe sentence that stays with her most is painfully familiar: \u201cI know this is wrong, but if I leave, everyone will blame me, not him.\u201d<\/span>Dr Sapare Rohit, consultant psychiatrist at SPARSH Hospital in Bengaluru, says \u201chope\u201d inside abusive marriages often survives through temporary affection, apologies and promises of change.\u201cMany women continue believing things will improve because marriage in India is deeply connected with family honour, children and social acceptance,\u201d he says. \u201cThey are taught that patience and sacrifice can repair relationships.\u201dThat emotional conditioning begins long before the abuse itself.Women are socialised to preserve marriages, tolerate discomfort and prioritise family stability over personal safety. Parents, often unintentionally, reinforce that expectation.\u201cYes, many parents unintentionally pressure daughters to remain in unsafe marriages,\u201d Rohit says. \u201cAdvice such as \u2018adjust\u2019, \u2018every marriage has problems\u2019, or \u2018think about the children\u2019 is often given with concern rather than harmful intent. However, this can make women feel unsupported and trapped.\u201d<\/p>\nThat pressure cuts across class.
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Twisha Sharma was educated, professionally accomplished and socially visible. Deepika Nagar came from a financially stable family. Yet both allegedly remained inside marriages their families say had already become abusive.\u201cEven highly educated and financially independent women continue enduring abuse due to emotional conditioning, fear of stigma, concern for children, or pressure to preserve marriage at all costs,\u201d Verma says.Divided by class, united by abuseOne of the most persistent myths around dowry violence is that it belongs only to rural or economically marginal spaces.The cases of Twisha, Deepika and others complicate that assumption.Twisha married into a legally prominent household in Bhopal. Her husband was an advocate, her mother-in-law, a retired district judge. Deepika\u2019s marriage represented upward social mobility between financially stable families. The abuse alleged in these cases did not emerge from social invisibility, but from environments associated with status, education and respectability.\u201cAs an advocate, I have observed that abuse today is not always visible in the traditional sense,\u201d Verma says. \u201cIn many educated and financially stable families, the violence is psychological \u2013 isolation, intimidation, manipulation, monitoring and continuous emotional degradation.\u201dRohit says the emotional cost of being considered a \u201cgood wife\u201d in India remains devastatingly high.\u201cMany women are expected to prioritise family stability over their own emotional well-being,\u201d he says. \u201cSociety frequently praises women for tolerating suffering instead of encouraging healthy relationships.\u201dOver time, that conditioning reshapes women\u2019s understanding of abuse itself.\u201cContinuous abuse often makes them feel guilty, inadequate, or responsible for the breakdown of the relationship, even when they are the victims,\u201d Verma says.<\/p>\nWhat numbers reveal
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The scale of the crisis extends far beyond individual cases.According to the NCRB\u2019s Crime in India 2024 report, India recorded 5,737 dowry deaths last year \u2014 an average of nearly 16 women every day.Uttar Pradesh recorded the highest number at 2,038, followed by Bihar with 1,078 cases. Madhya Pradesh reported 450 cases, Rajasthan 386, and West Bengal 337. Among metropolitan cities, Delhi recorded the highest number at 111.But the numbers reveal more than prevalence. They expose the persistence of dowry across changing social realities.Urbanisation did not eliminate dowry. Education did not eliminate dowry. Economic mobility did not eliminate dowry. Instead, dowry adapted itself to aspiration and status.The demands simply became more expensive. <\/p>\n\n
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<\/p>\nWaiting to be saved
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What statistics cannot fully capture is the emotional architecture of these marriages \u2014 the waiting, the bargaining, the hope that things will improve before they become fatal.Women wait for husbands to change. Families wait for tensions to settle. Parents wait for the \u201cright time\u201d to intervene more forcefully. Society waits until the violence becomes impossible to deny.And by then, it is often too late.\u201cMany women continue staying in abusive marriages not because they do not recognise the abuse,\u201d Verma says, \u201cbut because they fear being blamed more for leaving the marriage than the violence itself.\u201dPerhaps that is what makes these deaths particularly haunting: most of these women did not die silently. They spoke. They warned. They asked for help. But somewhere between social respectability, family honour, fear of stigma and the endless pressure to \u201cadjust\u201d, their warnings were absorbed into the normal rhythm of marriage itself \u2014 until escape became impossible. Days before her death, Twisha Sharma allegedly summed up that entrapment in a message that would later sound like a warning against the institution:\u201cI am trapped bro. Bas tu mat phansna.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n
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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cHumaari ladki toh g\u0101i hai\u2026 muh se awaaz nahi nikalti\u2026 sehmi sehmi si rehti hai,\u201d Twisha Sharma\u2019s relatives joke as the newlywed waits after her \u201ckanyadaan\u201d for her husband. It is the kind of familiar \u201cladki waale\u201d humour heard at countless Indian weddings – a performative reassurance to the groom\u2019s family that their daughter is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13774,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[133],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-country"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13773\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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