The Safe Natal Home and Other Myths: Sibling Violence and Incest in India

The Safe Natal Home and Other Myths: Sibling Violence and Incest in India

Wenner-Gren Foundation / Bailleur de fonds

This article focuses on childhood-based sibling violence against adolescent girls in urban India and highlights the ways in which culture shapes, morphs, disguises and elides particular forms of kin-based aggression and presents it as protection, love and routine. It extends the study of familial violence by highlighting women's narratives about violence perpetrated by adolescent brothers or brother-like figures. Contrary to an imagined childhood as a time of benevolent nurturing and care, it reveals that it is in the natal home that the young learn the script of violence and that such forms of aggression help to eventually crystallise their subjectivities. By shifting the issue of violence against women away from the discourse of rights and reframing it within discourses of power, it disturbs traditional definitions of family, victim, survivor, perpetrator and ally, and reveals how women navigate within the shifting contradictions of kinship regimes.

Development, Cultural Studies, Sociology and Political Science, History

Family, India, Kindship, Marriage, Sibling, Urban, Violence