session three: DAUGHTERS: DISPLACED, DISPOSSESSED - DOWRY IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBALISATION

Visual Testimony: I am woman - whose wisdom was once priceless

Expert Witness: Nalini Nayak, Self-Employed Women's Association Union, Kerala

No form of violence against women is perhaps so directly linked to the economic structures as the demand for dowry; a form of violence that is escalating now with the new economic policies and liberalisation measures whose logic it is to draw every realm of human experience and relationship into the market. How has this logic transformed the institution of marriage and that of dowry? What are the new forms of despair, displacement and dispossession it is creating for women, especially in marginalised communities who are being rendered more vulnerable in the globalised world of survival of the fittest.

This session will hear testimonies of women forced to migrate in order to earn for the dowry of their daughters, women from the increasingly impoverished fisher folk and desperate farming communities struggling with increasing indebtedness and suicides; women from within the unregulated garment industry that will not stoop to exploit women's labour using the institution of marriage... voices that have been and will continue to be silenced by the rhetoric of progress and development that is supposed to have transformed women's lives.



from every testifyer are some more photos, below the first photo of each one you can find her testimony