Abuse? No. It’s an ‘Adjustment.’

Arnab Goswami and Barkha Dutt, journalists who occupy opposite ends of India’s media and political spectrum found themselves asking versions of the same horrendous question after a woman was violently murdered after sustained abuse and torture in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. It gives some solace to witness such consensus driven by morality and humanity.

NCRB reports indicate that an average of 16 women die daily, due to marital abuse. Yet, even numbers this staggering have failed to create empathy powerful enough to shift the instinctive scrutiny away from victims and toward the systems and individuals accused of brutalising them. If this remains a situation even after a victim has lost her life to spousal violence, one can only imagine the coercion, gaslighting and psychological control women endure when they survive and attempt to speak out.

Another battered and murdered young woman but does it change anything? Does it stop the abusers from depriving the dead of her dignity?

Tale as old as time

The Indian Criminal Justice system suffers from a peculiar paradox. It is simultaneously over-powered and under-capacitated. The police can summon, surveil and detain with extraordinary speed but struggles with basic forensic integrity, scene preservation, chain-of-custody discipline and gender sensitive investigation. This is followed by a painfully familiar cycle.

The moment abusive husbands and complicit families get exposed, the oldest defense strategy in the book unfolds with chilling predictability. Deny it, discredit it, shame her, blame her, assassinate her character and walk away scot-free. The larger failure is it’s social before it’s legal.

The public discourse shifts from examining allegations of abuse to dissecting a woman’s life and her choices, whether true or false. Her reproductive choices judged, her life and her right to die with dignity stripped, her memories sullied, confidential medical details casually weaponized, prescription medication conflated with substance abuse, character assassination masquerading as defence strategy. And all this against a woman no longer alive to defend herself.

The burning issue, however, is the culture that fuels this defense strategy and continues to harp on a woman’s dignity.

How long will Indian families continue forcing daughters to stay in marriages that are visibly destroying them? Why do so many women stay in relationships they describe as suffocating, abusive or unbearable?

India still conditions women to preserve relationships at the cost of their own safety. Endurance is romanticised as maturity. Silence is mistaken for strength. Women are taught to adjust to humiliation, negotiate with cruelty and survive emotional erosion until the violence becomes impossible to hide. Society continues to treat marital suffering as a private inconvenience rather than a crime.

The conditioning becomes deadly when combined with power, influence and institutional opacity. A young woman in visible distress still feels compelled to stay and act happy because society has trained her to fear the stigma of separation more than the danger of staying. The tragedy is not merely that women suffer violence, it is that they are often persuaded to normalise it until it becomes fatal.

Many women today are not restrained by illiteracy or lack of ambition. They are trapped by emotional conditioning and social pressure sophisticated enough to disguise suffering as sacrifice. That is why recent cases across India have struck such a nerve. They force society to confront a deeply inconvenient truth.

The real issue is the red flag that society continues to overlook before another woman becomes a cold headline, another statistic, and eventually, a forgotten file.

File and the fatigued law enforcement

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect is not the frequency of the cases but the institutional fatigue and lack of sensitivity as well as awareness around abuse. This is severely worse when powerful people and politicians immediately protect their own kind, public servants and judges stay silent and to some extent actively cover up the truth until the news cycle fades and public outrage subsides.

We have laws criminalizing dowry, domestic death, abetment to suicide, and cruelty. Yet the implementation remains inconsistent. Investigations constantly get compromised, prosecutions go on for decades and the hope for justice wilts over time.

One of the most persistent institutional blind spots in India’s response to domestic violence is the continued incapacity to recognize cruelty in its modern and nuanced forms. Law enforcement personnels are often not equipped to respond to patterns of sustained emotional abuse, coercive control, pressure, financial deprivation, sexual abuse, isolation and humiliation that rarely leave immediate forensic markers, but they systematically dismantle a person’s dignity and autonomy over time.

Law enforcement mechanisms still remain disproportionately conditioned to respond to visible violence. As a result, many women approaching authorities are often met not with intervention, but with counselling aimed at reconciliation, even in circumstances where the marriage itself has become unsafe and cruel.

The challenge becomes more complex because domestic violence rarely presents itself in neat legal compartments. Cruelty is cumulative. Neglect is gradual. Desertion is not always physical absence; it can exist within the same household through emotional abandonment, humiliation and systematic withdrawal of dignity. Yet institutional responses often continue to search for singular “incidents” instead of recognising prolonged patterns of harm.

Investigative mechanisms designed for conventional crimes frequently struggle to process layered domestic abuse where evidence lies not merely in injuries, but in years of cumulative behavioural conditioning, deprivation, manipulation, prolonged intimidation and emotional erosion. This lack of sophistication in understanding the extremities of domestic cruelty creates a dangerous gap between what women experience and what institutions are prepared to formally acknowledge.

Simultaneously, procedural realities often disproportionately favour the accused, even though this is an aggravated offence. Bail jurisprudence, rooted correctly in the principle of personal liberty and factors of social standing, age and other demographic factors, can in practice create severe asymmetry in domestic abuse cases where survivors and complainants continue to remain socially vulnerable.

Witness intimidation, pressure for settlement, social ostracisation and narrative manipulation frequently begin immediately after arrest or interim relief. In many cases, families of victims find themselves fighting not merely for justice, but against exhaustion, influence and institutional fatigue.

The judiciary, despite significant progressive jurisprudence on women’s dignity and rights, also operates within structural limitations. Overburdened courts, prolonged trials, aggressive cross-examinations, repeated mediation pressures and skepticism toward survivor testimonies often make the process emotionally punishing for survivors. There remains an institutional tendency to view domestic violence through the lens of preserving the family unit rather than interrogating whether the relationship itself has become unsafe.

The consequences are profound.

Women are frequently required to prove cruelty in forms that institutions are still insufficiently equipped to accept. Emotional abandonment, humiliation, coercive dependence and psychological destabilization rarely leave neat forensic trails, yet their consequences can be devastatingly fatal.

It is crucial that law enforcement and judiciary evolve beyond conventional understandings of violence and develop greater sophistication in recognising the extremities of domestic abuse. Failing which, the promise of justice in such cases will continue to remain formally available but substantively elusive, arriving too late, after dignity has already been destroyed and lives irreversibly lost.

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