Anti-violence Counseling in India

Reforming Kinship Ideologies through Language Ideology?

In December of 2012, North India burst onto the international news, as middle-class Indians and activists took to the streets in response to a brutal gang-rape in Delhi. In the ensuing debates about how best to protect vulnerable women, women’s rights activists in the region articulated a long-standing concern: that patriarchal norms, rooted in patrilineal kinship ideology, distort the justice system. Police are frequently accused, for example, of pressuring rape victims to consider marriage with their aggressor. Activists pointed to the mishandling of rape cases as evidence that women are not heard as individual victims, but rather as disorderly family members. Women’s rights activists in India and abroad regularly criticize institutions like police stations and family courts for pressuring vulnerable women to “reconcile” with their abusers, whether individual men or family members. Activists worry that such reconciliation supports, rather than dismantles, the patriarchal structures that enable intimate violence against women.


Such critiques assume a sharp divide between supporting kinship ideologies (such as disciplining sexuality to marriage) and supporting vulnerable women. But in my own research, I found the division between kinship ideologies and support for women to be much fuzzier. At the anti-violence family counseling centers where I conducted research in Rajasthan, a state in northwestern India only a few hours west of Delhi, family counselors often recommend that female clients reconcile with their families. Counselors have a strong commitment to improving women’s lives; they are typically progressive middle-class Hindu women who had chosen to work in a women’s organization for little pay or recognition in order to support social change. How are we to understand their attempts to end intimate violence through counseling reconciliation?

The widespread critique of reconciliation as shoring up a patriarchal status-quo frames counseling interactions narrowly, in terms of what counselors tell their clients to do: to reconcile with their families. However, as linguistic anthropologists have long recognized, there is much more to interaction than the content of what people say. Counselors recognize that support, affection, and care, crucial tools for countering intimate violence, manifest through speech as well as through actions. I found that when counselors discuss reconciliation, they are not suggesting a return to a patriarchal status quo in which women suffer silently at the bottom of household hierarchies. Instead, counselors appropriate seemingly patriarchal rhetoric in order to help women advocate for their own well-being in their homes, and they do so primarily through helping clients reflect upon their own speech. This finding suggests that “reconciliation” need not merely reinforce patriarchal norms, and indeed, that the manipulation of seemingly patriarchal norms in and through language practices may in fact be central to efforts to address intimate violence in North India.

Over my time spent observing counseling sessions, I found that counselors explore how women and their family members organize household life through reciprocal exchanges of sentiments, resources and care. They trace ordered exchanges of care and support in and through speech, taking advantage of a local language ideology that imagines ordered exchanges of speech to be connected to ordered household exchanges of care and support. I call this ideology “asking-and-giving.”

Anthropologists have long observed the central role of exchange in North Indian kinship and family ideology. But what is striking within the context of the counseling centers is the profound importance of speech in enacting and indexing these exchanges. Counselors and clients believe that households are ordered when family members exchange forms of material and sentimental support according to their place within household hierarchies. In an ideal household, family members are supported by those hierarchies, rather than harmed by them: elders support and nurture juniors, while juniors care for elders; family members can ask for what they need, and give what they can, in order to support each other. Counselors and clients alike believe that women are harmed, abused, or neglected when these exchanges become disordered, and that by ordering the household they address the problem of household violence.

Counselors and clients both believe that appropriate language use in and about the household consists of ordered verbal exchanges of asking and giving that mirror and enact the exchanges that order households. Counseling sessions are awash with suggestions about how to control and transform the exchange of speech in the home: as one counselor advised a female client, “If someone insults you in your house [literally “gives you an insult”], don’t give it back.” Clients and counselors debate how to ask, how to give verbal permission, how to alter interactions and relationships through changing what was exchanged in speech (trading a polite question in return for a barb, not demanding too much information of a busy elder).

Counselors explicitly articulate the role of asking-and-giving in ordering the home. They encourage their female clients to order their homes by ordering their speech. If women speak as if household exchanges are already appropriately ordered, their speech might in fact create the order that it is meant to reflect. Counselors encouraged clients to reflect on and openly discuss their own language and the language of family members, highlighting how ordered asking-and-giving in speech reflected and pointed towards supportive household exchanges. Counselors believe that by speaking properly, family members—even junior, female wives and daughters—can re-order disordered cycles of household exchange.

Counselors manipulate locally understood connections between speech practices and household practices, using reflective speech to turn the tools of “traditional” kinship ideology to women’s advantage. Their efforts to do so only emerge if we pay attention not to the content of what they tell clients to do, but instead to how counselors engage and transform language use, how they recognize and take up locally understood connections between kinship ideology and language ideology.

Please send your comments, contributions, news and announcements to SLA Contributing Editors Aaron Ansell (aansell@vt.edu) or Bonnie Urciuoli (burciuol@hamilton.edu).





via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/07/01/anti-violence-counseling-in-india/