Gendered Violence and Urban Transformation in India and South Africa

Violence against women affects almost 1 in 3 women across the world, and many scholars claim that it has risen over the past 20 years. This violence takes various forms ranging from rape, intimate/domestic partner violence, including emotional, financial, and physical abuse, female infanticide, sex-selective abortion, forced trafficking, and sexual harassment. These forms of violence affect women in families, workplaces, police custody, educational institutions, and various public spaces. The field of study on violence against women is currently fragmented across disciplines such as criminology, public health, and demography. The data and methodology of a large number of influential studies tends to be based on surveys and big data, although qualitative studies are increasingly common. These studies have filled a crucial gap by highlighting risk factors such as alcoholism, abusive family history, poverty, lack of basic infrastructure among others. However, with few notable exceptions there is a paucity of studies that demonstrate the mechanisms that translate risk factors into actual acts of violence, that build comparisons across specific cases, and that situate both the presence of violence and responses to it, in national, regional and local histories of gender formation.
Our research will push the frontiers of a 'second wave' of research on violence by moving in the direction of deeper and more complex theorising of violence, of its causes and motivating factors.
The two urban cases Delhi that are the focus of this project - Delhi NCR (India) and Johannesburg (South Africa) - have acquired a reputation for very high levels of sexual violence, both private and public. As cities within countries undergoing rapid transition - post-apartheid liberalisation in South Africa, and state-led development to economic liberalisation and Hindu nationalism in India - gender relations and enactments of violence in these countries have multiple, inter-related causes that vary across caste, class, race, and region. We will ask whether and how factors such as racial or class inequality, poverty, or other environmental, contextual and historical factors make a difference to actual enactments of violence - sexual and interpersonal - against women. How does urban transformation affect gender relations, women's autonomy, and the perceived clash between 'tradition' and 'modernity'? To answer these questions requires time-consuming and painstaking qualitative research, with long-term immersion in the field. Such immersion will elicit the deeper mechanisms beneath correlating factors such as class and violence, and allow us to better understand whether and how poverty, racism or other structural factors enable violence in particular families, or individuals' lives, and furthermore to develop a better understanding of invisibilised middle-class gendered violence.
To understand the complex dynamics of violence requires an appreciation of how these major transformations are manifested in everyday life, and why in these daily rhythms of life, violence against women becomes so prevalent. The innovation of this project is the use qualitative methodologies requiring immersion of the researchers in the daily life of specific neighbourhoods, while at the same time looking at how local and national state agencies and policies frame the problem of gendered violence. The the project will seek to compare the particular insights from the two cities, to draw broader conclusions about the effects of globalisation and urban transformation on gender relations and violence.

Scholars and practitioners in the field of violence against women have reflected on the fact that despite decades of legislation and policy efforts such violence continues to proliferate, indeed grow in many parts of the world. Our team has identified a clear need to build on this insight and move towards a 'second wave' of research on violence that understands sexual and intimate partner violence within particular histories and contexts. By analysing the gap between these efforts and actual violence and its causes, our research can speak to a real need among a range of authorities and stake-holders. Many stakeholders expressed to us the need for localized approaches to tackling violence, particularly those involving members of the communities themselves.
The stakeholders engaged by and the beneficiaries positively affected by the proposed research, the impact activities and tangible outputs across a range of media channels, and method of ensuring benefit are outlined below:
1. NGOs/third sector actors in India and South Africa will co-produce research-led pamphlets and leaflets, and will be engaged in developing and refining the research at all stages. As key stakeholders they will benefit from all of the resources produced as part of our impact plans, including audio-visual outputs which they will be encouraged to upload to their websites free of charge. Their professional capacity to provide support for survivors will be enhanced by the increased expertise and knowledge base.
2. Women in the researched communities, whose direct involvement in knowledge coproduction through focus groups, interviews and participant observation will itself be empowering. They will directly benefit from the awareness-raising pamphlets and leaflets, produced in partnership with NGO/third sector bodies in response to our research fundings, and will become more aware of existing resources and support. They will also be direct beneficiaries of better tailored approaches from local NGOs.
3. Children will directly benefit from the storybooks produced in India which will introduce them to gender sensitivity at an early age and dispel existing myths and misconceptions about gender stereotypes that lead society to normalize abuse and violence of women. As such children in India tend to be ignored in attempts to introduce change in society, and we will address that need directly. Other community-based audiences will benefit from the artist-in-residence led activities in Johannesburg, and will be directly empowered through their participation in these events.
4. Audiences that view the documentary film/video clips will directly benefit from a well-researched perspective on gendered violence which will dispel the myths surrounding this violence by addressing its cross-class nature, the multiple locations and forms of violence, interrelations between different forms of abuse and violence, and the granular data that will shed a light on normalisation of violence against women. Augmenting the literature with visual products is a way to encourage audiences to experience this content differently, to engage along more affective dimensions, and reaches different kinds of audiences, making the outcomes of this research accessible to publics who might not otherwise engage with content about gendered violence or who are exposed to often misleading and sensationalist media depictions of gendered violence.