Bell Bajao! A call to action to end domestic violence
By Charukesi Ramadurai

It is a lazy Sunday morning for the man in his pyjamas, as he sips his tea and reads the newspaper. Tries to read the newspaper, that is. For he is constantly distracted by the sounds of a loud argument floating through the thin barrier of the shared walls of the housing complex he lives in. It is not quite an argument; it is the sound of a man berating a woman for a trifling domestic issue. He increases the volume of the radio on the table next to him to drown out the sounds. Nothing works. He gets up, puts on his shirt and walks with a purpose across the corridor to the house where the noise is coming from, and rings the bell. A man opens the door with a tentative look to see this stranger staring intently at him, the slightest tinge of aggression on his face. A second of silence, and then the person outside the door holds a hand out and says, “Can I borrow some milk?” By the time the man returns to the door, the stranger has vanished.

The moment has passed. Another incident of domestic violence has been halted.

Bell Bajao! Ring the bell, stop domestic violence - says this campaign which has been on air in Indian television since August 2008. The campaign was conceived by Breakthrough, an international human rights organization. It was created along with Ogilvy & Mather, the advertising agency, and supported by the Union Women and Child Development Ministry.

Staggering figures
Take a moment to read these figures: In India, every three minutes, a crime is committed against a woman. Every six hours, a young married woman is burned, beaten to death or driven to commit suicide. And according to the third National Family Health Survey published in 2006 (NFHS 3), over 40 percent of Indian women have been victims of domestic violence at some stage in their lives (while a controversial study by the UN Population Fund published just a year earlier pegs the figure at a much higher 70 percent).

Domestic violence is by no means endemic to India. 60 percent of women killed in the United States are victims of domestic violence, and it is the leading cause of injury among women in the age group of 15 - 44. Nor is domestic violence restricted to an illiterate population. In a prosperous and entirely literate country like Switzerland, statistics show that 12.6% of Swiss women suffer from physical violence, while 11.6% have faced sexual violence. Click here for more on domestic violence in Southasia.

What is scary in the Indian context is societal attitudes towards violence against women, specifically violence within the closed walls of a home, a family, or a marriage. More than 50% of the men surveyed in the third NFHS and 55% of the women believe that violence against women is warranted under several circumstances. It is not that Indian women are particularly given to masochism; it is the effect of several years of conditioning. Your husband is your god, a girl is told from the time she learns to think. Adikkira kai thaan anaikkum – the hand that beats is the hand that hugs, goes a popular song from an old Tamil movie, encouraging the woman to turn the other cheek.