Domestic Dangers

Abstract

This article critically analyzes suicide as self-directed violence against Indian women. Although official statistics report a higher suicide rate for men than for women in India, it is women's suicide that is at the center of widely publicized social and policy debates. Through case studies, newspaper reports, and statistical accounts, women's household deaths and suicides are scrutinized in this article. Because the dominant context of women's suicide is the marital family, self-destructive behaviors have been compared to dowry death, one form of violence against women perpetrated by others within the marital family. Based on the author's ethnographic research in Maharashtra, the author argues that women's household deaths be viewed as part of a broad incitement to suicide in which violence is internalized and directed against the self.