Violence against women in India: three essays on its offline and online forms

Abstract

Despite significant increase in research efforts on violence against women (VAW) in the past two decades, key gaps remain, particularly for emerging issues such as climate and VAW, and online VAW. This dissertation attempts to fill these gaps in literature by examining two separate and lesser studied areas of inquiry related to VAW in India- a) the relationship between droughts, an extreme weather event, and married women’s experience of intimate partner violence (IPV) (Study 1), and b) online misogyny or online hate speech against women- its temporal prevalence on Twitter before and during COVID-19 (Study 2), and its relationship with offline normative attitudes and behavior (Study 3). Integrating remote sensing data on drought status with information on women’s experience of IPV from two rounds of a nationally representative survey (National Family Health Survey or NFHS; 2015-16 and 2019-2021; N=122,696 women), Study 1 found that droughts increase the risk of married women experiencing physical and emotional IPV in India. Study 2 used supervised machine learning methods to predict the status of misogyny across a large corpus of over 30 million tweets posted from India between 2018 and 2021. Interrupted Time Series Analysis showed that the absolute volume as well as proportion of these misogynistic tweets posted from India increased significantly after the onset of COVID-19, relative to trends prior to the pandemic. Study 3 is an ecological study that merged information on offline normative attitudes and behaviors from NFHS (2019-2021) with data on online misogyny prevalence at a sub-regional level. Results showed that gender-related offline normative behavior was significantly associated with online misogyny on Twitter. Findings support the growing body of evidence regarding the relationship between climate and VAW, highlighting the need for gender responsive strategies for disaster management and preparedness. With regards to online forms of VAW, results emphasize that online misogynistic rhetoric is prevalent and increasing on Twitter; it often occurs in tandem with offline contexts where control of and violence against women is normative. Online violence prevention efforts need to be part of the overall agenda of VAW, given the strong links between offline norms and online misogyny