As the Coronavirus pandemic hit the world hard, equally hard-hitting has been its impact on women all across the world. The Coronavirus may have mutated, but so has the omnipresent violence against women. People struggled to keep themselves employed, the women tried even harder, living up to the domestic expectations along with their professional ones.
Quarantine and Social Distancing have been endorsed as the most effective methods by the government to take on the virus. In a country like India, where the population is a gigantic 138 crores, the idea of social distancing seems a bit far-fetched. Yet, with the forced lockdown, people understand what it means to be a woman. How?
Women, for over centuries, have been forced to live in such lockdowns created most definitely by the male-dominated society, and in all honesty, this has not changed much over the years. So, when the entire nation went into a lockdown, the dominant discourse remained that of unemployment, simply ignoring the fact that many women have been living in a lockdown since times immemorial.
But one may come up with an argument that the times have changed and now women are more liberated than they were. But are they? Domestic violence cases reached a 10 year high. Between 25 March and 31 May, 1,477 cases were registered, more than those received in March and May in the previous 10 years. Not to forget that underreporting owing to inaccessibility and the tethering stigma shuts out women. Quite literally, to utilise the state resources to their perusal.
The CMIE reported that unemployment levels in April reached a shooting 23.52% from 8.74% in March. Lack of economic security, especially amongst the male members, unsurprisingly puts greater pressure on them to make ends meet, further enabling them to exert greater control over their partners. Thus, employment of the male members becomes a buffer against the potential acts of domestic violence.
An underrated aspect of the lockdown was that with alcohol shops being shut, many men exhibited their exasperation over the same by expressing their anger on women, which would otherwise also have been the case had the liquor shops been functional. Either way, women would have suffered. One can argue that the idea of men being the sole breadwinners of the family is problematic for it exudes toxic masculinity, but India is yet to reach the starting point of that tangent.
The pandemic has in actuality forced survivors of domestic abuse to be locked in with their abusers. Greater have been the sufferers of the marginalised sections of the society who were the dual victims of dire economic conditions and homebound violence.
So where do the women go? What do they do? It is unreasonable to ignore that while the world flogged pharmacies for immunity boosters, many women were in the danger of not being able to access menstrual products owing to a halt in production and fear of an increase in prices.
The migrant labour crisis forced many pregnant women to give birth on the go, which meant travelling several hundreds of kilometres on foot after having given birth. Yet the Indian media chose to condemn China rather than reporting the dilapidated healthcare system.
As the country celebrates the 9-day Navratri festival with the 10th day symbolically marking the victory of good over the evil, it is the need of the hour to introspect rather than worshipping the migrant woman as Goddess Durga. It is time to break the evil shackles that tether the fate of the female.