The Family and Its Myth
The Indian family is often described as sacred, but for many women and girls it is the most dangerous place they will ever know. Roughly one in three Indian women between the ages of eighteen and forty nine has experienced domestic violence, while an overwhelming majority never seek help. Domestic violence and cruelty by husbands or relatives routinely top crime against women statistics, and dowry deaths still number in the thousands annually.
Domestic violence cases run into lakhs every year, with some states such as Bihar and Karnataka reporting lifetime prevalence rates for women near or above half the female population. When these figures are mapped, the central site of violence is revealed to be the marital or natal home, not an anonymous public space. Violence against women is overwhelmingly private, routinized, and embedded within family life.
Religion, Honour, and Justification
Religion often provides the moral vocabulary used to justify this violence, and the structure of justification is remarkably consistent across communities. Hinduism glorifies the pativrata ideal, in which a woman’s primary duty is obedience and service to her husband and his family. Islam places male authority at the centre of family decision making and control over women’s mobility. Caste based notions of honour routinely treat women’s sexuality as family property. Christian and Sikh contexts have their own versions of family sanctity and honour.
Across these traditions, the family is presented as a non negotiable good, while a woman’s role is defined through sacrifice, adjustment, and loyalty. When women resist these roles, religion and honour provide ready made moral cover for punishment for thinking of freedom.
Law and Institutional Reinforcement
The legal framework has often reinforced this structure. The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 promises protection orders, residence rights, and monetary relief on paper, but implementation remains obtuse, patchy, and painfully slow. Cases are frequently treated as ordinary family disputes. Protection Officers are poorly staffed and lack real enforcement capacity. Mediation and settlement are prioritized even in cases involving severe or repeated abuse.
Most revealing is the continued existence of the marital rape exception in the penal law, which states that sexual intercourse by a man with his wife is not rape so long as she is above a specified age. Courts have begun to question this exception, but it remains in force. Its message is clear. The law does not fully recognize a woman’s right to bodily autonomy once she becomes a wife. The institution of marriage is protected even at the cost of women’s safety.
Feminist Critiques of the Family
Feminist thinkers such as Shulamith Firestone and Andrea Dworkin argue that the nuclear family is not a neutral private arrangement that occasionally fails, but a core institution through which patriarchy operates. In this view, marriage in its current form is built on women’s structural subordination. It transfers women from their natal families to their husband’s family, ties their survival to men’s incomes, normalizes unpaid domestic and care labour, and grants men routine sexual access as a marital norm.
Violence is one of the tools that keeps this institution functioning. Honour killings, dowry deaths, disciplining women for clothing or mobility choices, forced pregnancies, and forced sex within marriage appear as different expressions of the same entitlement. Women’s bodies and lives are treated as belonging to the family.
Economic Dependence and the Absence of Exit
At the centre of this system lies economic dependence. Women who are beaten, harassed for dowry, or threatened with death often cannot leave, not due to a lack of courage, but because there is nowhere materially safe to go. Many have no independent income, no savings, no property in their own names, and no social network willing to support them once they exit marriage.
Even working women may find their salaries controlled by husbands or in laws. Laws that mention maintenance or shared household rights offer limited relief when jobs are scarce, wages are low, and landlords refuse to rent to single women. The family becomes both the site of violence and the economic unit that keeps women alive. Leaving often means choosing between danger inside and destitution outside.
Acknowledging Limits and Complexities
This critique has limits that must be acknowledged. Not every family is violent. Many women experience genuine care, reciprocity, and emotional security within family structures. Some couples build more equal relationships, and there are fathers and brothers who support women’s autonomy and safety. Education, employment, and access to resources can expand women’s options and make resistance to abuse easier.
These realities matter, but they do not alter the underlying pattern. The existence of non violent marriages does not dissolve the statistical reality that home remains the primary site of violence for women as a group. Individual kindness does not cancel out legal doctrines like the marital rape exception or social practices that treat daughters as carriers of honour rather than as full persons.
Refusal, Exit, and the Question of Reform
The uncomfortable question is not merely how to improve implementation of existing laws, but whether an institution that systematically exposes women to risk, makes exit materially difficult, and is shielded by both religion and law can be meaningfully reformed in its current form. Women need real exits. These include economic independence, housing outside family structures, legal recognition of chosen kinship networks, and a social environment in which remaining unmarried or leaving a violent marriage is not treated as moral failure.
Some women, particularly younger urban women, are already experimenting with refusal. They are questioning stereotypical heterosexual relationships, rejecting marriage, and withdrawing from emotional, sexual, and domestic obligations imposed on them. These choices are often dismissed as selfish or foreign, yet they may represent early efforts to build lives and solidarities outside an institution that has repeatedly failed them.
Women need a way out of families that function as cages, not merely better locks on the cage door. They need social and material conditions that make it possible to say no and survive that refusal. This piece has focused on why the family, as it exists today, is deeply unsafe for many women and why incremental legal reform cannot fully address a structurally violent institution. The next question is what it looks like when women refuse the script altogether and attempt to live without depending on men or marriage for identity, security, or respectability. Those experiments, and the movements emerging around them, warrant closer examination.
Amrita Azad
a voice