SBS Punjabi interviewed some of Australia’s Indian-origin women activists who are using their experience, resources and voices to help, educate and provide emergency services in the form of lodging and counselling to victims of domestic violence, many of whom they claim have faced harassment to provide a dowry.
One of the leading change agents is Manasi, who has been working as a health promotion officer with various Melbourne-based service providers for over a decade.
Manasi told SBS Punjabi that she believes that dowry in itself is not the real problem: the issue lies with the extortion and violence that is inflicted upon women under the guise of this age-old practice.
“Historically, dowry was given for financial security to the woman who was going to her husband’s family. Earlier (in India), women were not entitled to inherit anything from her father’s estate. So in a way dowry was the way that she would receive her inheritance-so dowry didn’t begin as a bad custom.”
“But what has happened over time is that the greed has increased and people have started seeing the bride as some sort of a cash cow- oh she can get this and that, so it’s leading to abuse. And this is causing the problem and that is what we need to address,” she adds.
Kittu Randhawa provides frontline care and support to victims of family violence in Sydney, and she believes that threats of deportation, visa issues, and permanent residency have a lot to do with family violence.
She says a dowry demand is often made by Australia-based grooms, in order to recover the money spent on migrating to the lucky country.
“It’s become quite an easy profit making mechanism for people who come here and then spend a lot of money on their permanent residency -- whether it’s them still being a student or they are on a work visa. They tend to look at this as some kind of recoup through their marriage and that’s where it all starts.”
“However, for that person who marries into the country here, it can be a complete nightmare. They can come here and there will be constant ongoing demands. And the way we can really correlate it to the citizenship is, that we see the partners - and mostly they are women - when their residency comes due for permanency, the demands go up, the violence and the abuse go up.”
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Ms Randhawa suggests that the Indian community living in Australia first needs to acknowledge that dowry abuse is prevalent and she has first-hand experienced that it is one of the underlying causes of violence within many migrant families.
“What we need to do in Australia is that first of all have a formal acknowledgement that it exists and its connection to domestic violence and abuse.
“And then we need to start unpacking how do we address this, bearing in mind that we have multiple things to consider here-- which is two different jurisdictions-the Indian and the Australian one and it can make a difference how you get married whether in India or in Australia.
“And then we need to start looking at pathways as to how we can get matters resolved and hope to get some prevention measures in.”
Meanwhile, another Sydney-based expert Amrit Versha, who has received the NAPCAN award from Australia’s Governor General for her tireless advocacy of women, children and refugee rights, believes that so much focus on dowry abuse seems misplaced because there are other pressing matters relating to prevention of family violence in the Australian Indian community.
“I think rather than sensationalizing the dowry issue we actually need to focus on what are the most prominent issues for our women.
“And one of the most important issues for grassroots workers like me has been the impact of temporary visas on women. We live in a country which has a transient population, we have a lot of temporary visas and there are a huge number of women I come across for whom I keep raising funds, because I can’t get services they can access.
Ms Versha argues that women on temporary visas are particularly vulnerable because they don’t have access to any government protection or services.
“They have no access to any service because the services we have under the domestic violence provision are for permanent residents only. So those women on temporary residency have no entitlement to Centrelink benefits, they have no economic support, no housing access. So a majority of the people I deal with are those who are actually getting access to nothing because even if they go to shelters, most of the times they have to pay.”
