Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant: Expression, Reporting, and Documentation of Domestic Violence Law

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The proposed research analyzes how domestic violence claims move from NGO sites to civil courts in New Delhi, India. The hypothesis guiding the study is that the way domestic violence claims are presented by women and institutional actors is more important to case outcomes than the specific content of claims. This is because the content of domestic violence cases in the Indian legal system tends to vary relatively little. Consequently, it is expected that case presentation will largely determine whether women's grievances are recognized. The project will analyze how different forms of evidence are presented under the law, both when cases are initially heard in the NGO site and when they are disputed in civil court. The study will focus on the form and content of evidentiary presentations. Specifically, it will investigate how women's voices in the initial complaint are translated into written evidence of abuse by the NGO. It will then explore how women and their written claims travel into the courtroom, where they are evaluated alongside other evidence, such as competing testimonies, and media such as home snapshots. The research examines how claims are subjected to moral evaluation during the trial and what is at stake in using one evidentiary genre, versus another, in establishing obligations between kin. The project will consist of ten months of ethnographic fieldwork. By examining how claims are presented, and ultimately, assessed under the law, the project will contribute to a better understanding of legal services provisions generally, as well as specifically in the research site.