^ Right, well, they already have an "abstinence program" supplied by cultural traditions common to Hindus, Muslims and Christians alike (all of whom get AIDS), which is that neither men nor women should have sex outside of marriage--and you can see how well that's held up to changing family circumstances (men working alone in cities far from home for long periods)...5.7 million AIDS cases. To not teach people what AIDS is and how it's spread, or that transmission can usually be prevented by using a condom, is to say that you don't care if millions continue to die so long as the "right" values are being taught.
MrsSpringsteen said:
I should have clarified my question and asked if a man would be beaten to death by family members . I wonder if it's telling/significant that it was her in laws who did it.
It would be interesting to know if violent assaults committed by in-laws also happen in matrilineal areas; unfortunately I have no idea what the answer to that is. I think it's fair to say that one thing which is potentially problematic about either patrilineal or matrilineal systems (in which the newly married woman or man, respectively, uproots themselves from their family of birth and moves in with their husband's/wife's family where, realistically, they're likely to constitute a net drain on resources until their children are old enough to compensate) is that they put said spouse in an especially vulnerable position. But again, having AIDS sufferers around is a new and unprecedented situation in most villages, so you can't discount the effect of plain old fear on what may happen there--for all many people know, it might as well be the plague or leprosy or something; they don't understand what it is, only that it obviously spreads somehow (
look, now she has it too!) and that it's clearly fatal, and sometimes people can do awful things when they're convinced the mere presence of another person is a threat to their lives. Plus as I mentioned earlier, other villagers may well react by banishing the entire family (or denying them access to wells, schools etc.) if they see them harboring multiple afflicted persons--"today their family, tomorrow my own".
Perhaps what you had in mind by relating "how some of the treatment of women in India is" to this case was
sati, widow-burning.
Sati is an interesting example of how popular representations of early 'human rights campaigns' became entangled with 19th century "white-man's-burden" justifications for imperialism, and I often find Westerners have a wildly disproportional sense of how common it was/is. Basically,
sati was and is almost exclusively limited to specific castes in specific areas. For example, British East India Company records (e.g., Bentinck's 1829
On Ritual Murder in India) show that the practice was nearly confined to a group of "warrior" (
Kshatriya) castes native to specific regions of Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, among whom it apparently originated; that well under 1% of widows with that background commited
sati; and that most Indians had never even heard of the practice, let alone observed it. It's thought to have originated from a "chivalric" custom where women and, in some cases, children and other dependents, "voluntarily" threw themselves on the husband's funeral pyre after he was killed in battle...making "give me honor or give me death" a family affair.
The "British" campaign against it which Bentinck was associated with was actually instigated and sustained by Indian reformers led by Ram Mohan Roy. Nevertheless, the British were content to let the ban be presented abroad as an instance of a supposedly widespread "Hindoo abomination" being decisively ended through "enlightened" British intervention, and that myth seems to have stuck. Unfortunately, Roy's campaign did not succeed in forever abolishing all incidences of
sati, and in fact based on government records it seems to have increased significantly after the British changed property laws in the 19th century to require that all land be registered in the name of one man who "owned" it, converting land into capital and ending the tradition of collective ownership via familial and marital bonds in rural areas. (Not coincidentally, this seems to have been when the modern Indian understanding of "dowry" as a price paid by the bride's family to the groom's--'thank you for relieving us of this financial burden,' basically--emerged as well. Illegal nowadays, but still widely practiced.) So, over time an obscure rite occasionally practiced by specific groups in specific areas became a somewhat more generalized concept of how to rid oneself of a burdensome daughter-in-law--with the emphasis on 'somewhat,' as it still occurs overwhelmingly among people from the aforementioned castes and regions. Most authorities reckon an average of about 2000-3000 '
sati murders' a year (out of a population over 1.1 billion) is about right, but it's very hard to get a precise figure there because so many districts lump any and all murders of women by relatives--wife-beating, 'crimes of passion', perverse stuff from the urban criminal underworld, etc.--into a reporting category theoretically meant only for murders committed for the 'traditional' reasons of widowhood or dowry.
