Who Is The Criminal When It Comes To Dowry?

A social evil that has taken the lives of many and created a concept where the exchange of dowry is the only important thing in marriage—highlighting dowry as a ritual that started in the medieval period signifying the Independence of a woman, Which later served as a reason for 8,391 deaths (2010, survey). Dowry is a practice where the bride brings an amount of money and property to the groom during their marriage.

Today, Marriage as a social institution only gets practiced if there is an exchange of dowry which is a one-sided process from the bride’s side to the groom’s family. It is regarded as a status symbol of the family. Heavy dowries have always been an indicator of high social status in our society.

In turn, Increasing cases of dowry demands brought deaths. The brutal ritual took the lives of many innocent females and gave a nightmare to their families, draining everyone mentally and emotionally of the greed for property, cars, and otherworldly things. Families of the husband, who were hungry for these things, used extensively brutal means to ask for the dowry; if the needs were not fulfilled they displayed violence.

Who is the criminal?

As there are always two sides to everything questioning who is the criminal. Is it the father who married her daughter off or the brutality of people who are still practicing the ritual? The criminal standing in front of us is the mindset that is ruling over these people who still think dowry is usual to take, to exaggerate they threaten their wives and daughter-in-laws sometimes to death which will always be seen as a sign of hunger for money-related things.

Scrounging through the long history of deaths, sometimes just the husband is involved, and sometimes the whole family is the one supporting the crime, all masked in unrealistic expectations that their worth is in the dowry that they’re getting people who still think it is customary to take, exaggerate, and threaten their wives and daughter-in-laws sometimes to death which will always be seen as a sign of hunger for money-related things.

Dowry and sexual assault

Both move together, A woman who is expected in Indian society to be the homemaker and a childbearing machine in most cases is from her childhood and is educated that the house of her husband will be her official house to reside in, which altogether come as a shock that she is the most unsafe in that place where dowry is running everywhere.

She is left with nothing except asking for dowry from her parents and if they can not possibly generate it, the in-laws or the husband in such situations mainly forces her to go back to her biological parents.

Dowry is now not just a custom in Marriage but Marriage is a custom in dowry, the way it is practiced in Modern India has given it a whole different meaning which is not indicative of the Independence of the bride but unjust and a sign of suicide in our country.

This custom gave people to liberty to treat a bride as a commodity and not a new member who needs to be respected equally.