‘Only come back home when you are dead’

When Reema went back home — or the home that was once hers — her father told her not to keep coming back. The emotional and physical abuse she was facing at the hands of her husband and in-laws was her problem alone. As her mother put it, “Only come back when you are dead.”
Another woman, Meera, from an upper-middle class family, said she went back to her parental home at least ten times, begging not to be sent back to her abusive husband. “But every time, my father would say, ‘A child will fix everything. What will society say if you leave your husband?’ Even when I told him my child died from the beatings, he still wouldn’t let me stay. He supported us with rations but never took me back. For him, society’s opinion mattered more than my safety,” she recounts in NGO Swayam’s new study, ‘The

Natal Family

: A Neglected Site of Domestic

Violence against Women

’.