• Women prefer to put up with violence rather than raising their voice against it

Banke, December 6 Only a handful of complaints related to domestic violence have been filed at the judicial committees of local bodies in Banke, despite the fact that domestic violence is rife in the district. According to data maintained by the judicial committee at Kohalpur Municipality, there were just 16 cases filed with the law section of the committee in the first four months of this fiscal, and of them only two cases were related to domestic violence. “As women can hardly open up to report domestic violence, the same has to do with the fact that only a couple of domestic violence-related cases have been filed. On the contrary, such violence is pretty rife in the district,” said the law section Kohalpur Chief Pradip Kumar Rawat. Rawat added that as many as 10 of the 16 cased filed this fiscal were settled through conciliation. “While four cases are in the process of conciliation now, two cases that couldn’t be resolved have been referred to the court for further proceeding,” Rawat said. Kohalpur Municipality Deputy Mayor and the judicial committee Coordinator Sanju Kumari Chaudhary also linked the scenario of few numbers of domestic violence cases being filed to reluctance of women to open up and speak about violence committed against them. “Domestic violence is rampant in the Dalit and marginalised communities. However, only a few cases have been filed. The reason is obvious. Women prefer to put up with violence rather than raising their voice against it,” said Chaudhary, adding that most of these cases were resolved through conciliation. The judicial committees in other local bodies also have witnessed a negligible number of domestic violence cases. Some stakeholders have maintained that only a few cases were being filed at the committees as such cases were also looked into by local police at ward level, and also because of lack of awareness among women about existence of such mechanism whereby they can file complaints against violence meted out to them at home.