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INDIA WIDOWS – UNWANTED & UNPROTECTED
By Amy Toensing & Jessica Benko
Widows beg along a pilgrimage route in Govardhan,
India. Devout Hindus from all over India come here to pay homage to the sacred
mountain, Govardhan Hill. Image by Amy Toensing. India.
Widows
in India are shunned as bad luck and can lose their status and ability to
support themselves. Young widows with children are especially vulnerable to
violence and sexual exploitation.
Three
men govern the life of an Indian woman in traditional society: first her
father, then her husband, and finally her son. These relationships are supposed
to provide a woman with support and protection throughout her life as she bears
and raises the next generation. In practice, they enforce a dependence that can
leave a woman powerless if any of those relationships fail.
There
are more than 35 million widows in India, where the marriage of girls to much
older men makes widowhood a common outcome. A strong stigma persists, marking a
widow as deserving of her fate, as a poisonous presence whose own bad karma led
to the death of her husband. Many widows find themselves rejected by their
husband’s family as competition for family resources, a burden and a drain.
Only
about half of India’s female population is literate, and in less developed
areas, that percentage is far lower. Women have little chance of knowing or
enforcing their rights to inheritance or government pensions and little ability
to secure steady employment. Young widows, particularly those with children to
support, are especially vulnerable to violence and sexual exploitation.
The
precarious condition of many widows is the eventual outcome of a systematic
disempowerment of women that begins before birth. Until India succeeds in
addressing the social customs that reject widows, removing the economic and
educational disadvantages that prevent women from achieving independence, and
enforcing legislation to protect widows and their children, they will remain
the most vulnerable in India.
http://pulitzercenter.org/blog/this-week-india-widow-homophobia-olympics-sochi
Tanuja tries on her best outfit prior to going to
a family wedding. At 13-years-old and unmarried, her mother keeps her inside
most of the time for fear that she will get hurt or taken in the streets. In
conservative parts of India and especially in their neighborhood, a girl is
expected to get married at puberty; but her mother, a widow, will struggle to
find any of her three daughters respectable suitors without money for the
dowries. Image by Amy Toensing. India.