Thousands of women in India are murdered or driven to take their own lives over dowry disputes and female feticide each year

I believe it was my late mother, who told me about this horrible practice some 50 or more years ago. When will this abuse finally end?

Or is there something a Westerner misses here? Like it occurs only in rural areas or among Indian minorities etc. I also understand that it is perhaps very difficult to completely stop this practice, but I guess tremendous improvements were already achieved.

"Thousands of women in India are murdered or driven to take their own lives over dowry disputes each year—yet the cases no longer spark public outrage or debate, according to a new study, despite a rise in cases (from 1,841 in 1988 to 6,516 in 2022); dowries were officially banned in 1961 but remain widespread. ..."

From the abstract:

"This article investigates the relationship between attention and large‐scale killing that takes place away from warzones and battlefields.

Structural femicide in India in the form of dowry deaths and female feticide arguably erases as many lives every year as many wars and conflicts, yet it barely begets any public attention today.

The collective apathy toward structural femicide is puzzling and cannot be accounted for by the neoliberal turn of the feminist movement in India, or then by the juridical domestication of dowry‐deaths and sex‐selection.

This article offers a new genealogy for the demise of the protests against dowry‐deaths and the escalation of female feticide.

It argues that the new temporality inaugurated by The Hindu Marriage Act (1955) disembedded marriage alliances from long‐term ritual exchange to a pared down temporality calculable by law, enabling marriage payments to conjoin with the logic of capital in new ways.

Examining the waxing and waning of the public ire against dowry deaths, on the one hand, and a consistent indifference toward feticide, on the other, offers an opportunity to examine the political work of attention and releases the anthropological scholarship on attention from its current emphasis on algorithmic consumerism and self‐cultivation.

While the protests against dowry killings in the 1970s and 1980s were an exceptional moment, what pushed them out of political attention span was neither habituation, nor loss of newness, but rather new infrastructures of inattention constituted by capital, ritual, and the law."

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Infrastructures of Inattention and Necropolitical Kinship: Ritual, Capital, and the Time of the Law in India (open access)