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.