Dowry's indirect effects: The pressure of dowry makes a daughter's birth a disappointing event. Parents afraid of the dowries try preventing her from existing. In the 80's one could see billboards of Sonogram clinics preying on dowry fears with ads like "better 500 rupees now than 500,000 later" Between 1981- 1991 over 1 million female fetuses were aborted. In Punjab there are 793 girls per 1000 boys.

Dowry's direct effect: The quest for cash coupled with the devaluation of women creates the ideal backdrop for dowry murders: The in-laws, unhappy with the dowry demand more. When the parents don't pay up the anger is taken out on the bride. Eventually they think it'll be better to be rid of her so their son can remarry for more dowry and try driving her to suicide. Her parents don't help fearing damaging the family honor so seeing no other choice she sometimes takes her own life

Bride Burning is the most popular murder method. The woman is restrained in the kitchen and doused by cooking kerosene and lit by a match. Burning is popular because Kerosene is cheap and readily available. The saris most Indian women wear are combustible so the murder is hard to trace and in the privacy of the home. The survival rate of such deaths is also low ensuring the woman will never prosecute them. Even if she survives she typically succumbs to infection in the hospital. Even escape doesn't ensure safety. Divorce is still taboo in much of the subcontinent, seen as a shame upon the family honor. Three years ago an 18 y/o bride fled from the clutches of her brother in law as her mother in law poured kerosene and husband lit the match to her parents who asked the court to force her to return to her in-laws. The Court made her return making them promise not to harm her.

The law and the flaw: There are laws on the books condemning dowry murder but they don't work because those who are to uphold the law often turn a blind eye. The police and courts are a product of a society that generally believes in the inferior status of women. Others believe dowry murder to be private family matters. Of the thousands of reported dowry deaths less than 10% are investigated. Worse, the police often end up actively hurting the investigation by destroying evidence in exchange for bribes and reporting murders as suicides or accidents. Further, prosecutors rarely file charges even after complete investigations are conducted. Between 1961 and 1975 Indian prosecutors filed only one dowry death case. Further, dowry laws don't work because of the deep rooted history of gender inequality in a patriarchal society. As consumerism rises, the dowry demands are rising as well and the people who benefit don't want to get rid of a system that works for them. No matter what new laws come out, until the mentality changes, nothing changes. Women must be considered and treated as equals to men and worthy of the same respect.

Fixing the flaw: (1) There must be a greater priority on educating women and helping them become economically independent (2) NGO's should be able to file claims on behalf of victims when parents are unwilling (3) There must be well known shelters to turn to when fleeing such a situation (4) There must be education on the atrocity at all levels of government. Such education must be addressed in schools so children can be taught a better mentality at a younger age. (5) The media must increase awareness and publicize tragedies to help change the public perception on dowry violence (6) Organizations like Amnesty must publicise this so citizens from around the world can be made aware of the situation's gravity.

What can you do: Read about it. Care about it. Tell someone about it. The ripple effect of passing on knowledge and empathy cannot be understated.

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Are Our Sisters And Daughters For Sale?
By Himendra Thakur

Doesn’t the love of one’s country include love for one’s countrymen?

Or is it merely a fashionable thing, patriotism merely to find pride in something but not to actually strive towards a better nation?

A country is her people. Years ago, Rabindranath Tagore summed it up as: Desh mrinmoy noi, desh chinmoy The country is not a chunk of earth: it is a saga of consciousness.

Without the conscience of our people, this consciousness will fade. We must rouse ourselves to the daily indignities that surround us.

There are a thousand places and ways we can begin loving the people of our nation, and I offer but one here. It is a journey that each of us can begin quite easily, because the victims of this malaise – dowry – are within reach, they are our mothers, sisters, friends, neighbors.
People who we normally think of as “one of our own”, who we ought to protect with our lives if necessary, and yet the normal course of things has fallen so low that indignities heaped on our women do little more than make us look away.

Let us begin, then, with the people whose suffering we have even ceased to notice, let alone empathize with. Let us begin with the women around us, those whose marriage through dowry we regard as normal when in fact it is apalling.

Countless brides in India are constantly under harassment in their matrimonial homes because their fathers have fallen behind in the payment of endless dowry installments, or the dowry she did bring to her husband is regarded as too meagre.

Imagine the plight of a young woman, newly wed into an unfamiliar situation, and surrounded by those she has only just met, who regard her as a means to an end, little more than a device by which to enrich themselves.

She knows only too well that a bride may be killed for lack of dowry … she too must have heard the same stories we’ve all heard … but she does not know what to do.

She may have overheard her in-laws, even her own husband, talk casually about harassing her, and sometimes contemplate even killing her!

The kind of fear that instills in a person is beyond our ability to comprehend. It isn’t even fear, it is terror.

The cruelest aspect of this menace is the role that brides’ parents play in perpetuating it.

My inquiry at the Dowry Cell of New Delhi Police Department revealed that most of the parents of the bride do not want to take their daughters back.

There is considerable social stigma in India against those parents who shelter a married daughter back in their family.

In most of the cases, parents persuade the daughter to go back to her husband’s home, that is considered to be the highest form of behavior one can learn from the old scriptures.

The alternative for the scared bride is to go to one of those government shelters. However, these shelters are controlled by unscrupulous bureaucrats and their politician bosses who are accused of taking full advantage of the helpless condition of the victims who come to the shelters.

The reputation and working condition of most of the shelters are so horrible that a bride will prefer to die at the hands of her in-laws than to move one of those “shelters”.

So, she stays in the house of her in-laws, resigned to her fate.

Then, one evening, when she is working in the kitchen, someone throws a pail of kerosene on her, and someone else throws a burning match, and she turns into a ball of flames.

Can she save herself by taking off her clothes ?

There is no time.

Petroleum products like kerosene or gasoline work very fast, aided by her own body heat.

Once that splinter is thrown, there is no more chance of life.

Perhaps this sort of recital is gruesome, and we look away.

We imagine that it cannot happen to anyone we know, that our education and money has raised us above these village truths.

But that isn’t so – we merely glamorize the slavery we perpetuate, and pretend to endow our daughters and sisters with “gifts”.

These aren’t dowries, we tell ourselves, this is just to help her get a good start. Conveniently, we overlook the fact that there’s more than one person getting married, we don’t ask often enough why this good start mustn’t come from both sides.

With these pretexts, we dismiss these as unimportant issues.

And as we look away, an estimated 25,000 brides are killed or maimed every year in India over dowry disputes.

Intellectuals pull out their calculator and say it is less than 0.003% of India’s population.

They slide into research mode and throw a vast array of statistics about atrocities on women in USA, UK, Pakistan, and many other countries of the world.

Foundation owners refuse to help because there are so many other problems in India like street beggars, lepers, street children, bonded laborers, etc.

So, the brides keep on burning.

Except, when she burns, the “problem” is one hundred percent hers, not 0.003%. She is NOT suffering from economic exploitation like bonded labor or economic deprivation like poverty :

she is instead suffering from a very complex psychological set up in the minds of most of the people, the apathy of our times, and the stench of our unwillingness to eradicate dowry.

Many intellectuals do not like to talk about this subject.

They open their speech with a presentation how India is doing very good in other fields like computers, space technology, etc., as if achievements in these fields can be used as excuses to burn the brides.

A nation that trades in its people, sells its daughters into ready bondage, what words can describe these horrors?

What kind of progress teaches us to ignore these problems, to pretend that these can never come past our doors?

One day, 

our daughters too will pass into slavery, 

and the jewel in our eyes will lead 

the wretched life we choose to 

look away from. 

When will it be enough?

http://rashmanly.wordpress.com/2008/09/13/15858/

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Source: http://aishaiqbal.blogspot.com/2007/02/bride-burning.html