No abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown in India resulted in women informal economy workers being out of jobs and with no social security blanket to rely on. Women community leaders therefore worked with the state to reach out to the most vulnerable and marginalised populations. This resulted in decentralised units where decisions are made at the community level in a collective fashion including critical and diverse stakeholders, in collaboration with state authorities. This model works best where locally developed networks with high levels of community trust exist that enable community leaders to reach communities in distress quickly and effectively, ensuring that relief and aid is delivered to those who need it the most. Additionally, women coming together to advocate for themselves as women workers allows for us to build back better with a key focus on marginal populations such as women at the bottom of the pyramid.

In this paper I study the primary determinants of successful Violence Against Women legislation in national legislatures, with a specific focus on the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of 2013 passed in India. I employ Ordered Logistic Models to determine the effect of civic society and institutions on Violence Against Women legislation. I utilize observational data, modifying Htun and Weldon's VAW Dataset 1 by adding new variables of interest to the study. The results indicate that feminist movements work in tandem with government institutions to bring about legislation, contrary to the current stress on autonomous feminist movements. However, an in-depth analysis of the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of 2013 passed in response to civic protests calls into question the apparent success of the feminist movement, in part because of the implications of political co-optation and patriarchal attitudes on the acceptance and implementation of VAW legislation. Incongruence between feminist demands and societal norms weaken legislative effectiveness and therefore allows the state to circumvent the institutional failures and divert attention to the individual level rather than address the systemic issue of violence against women.