[Reader-list] The Dark Side of Microcredit

[Shambhu Rahmat]

http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/5050/16_days/dowry_microcredit
The dark side of micro-credit
Santi Rozario

Bangladesh's pioneering micro-finance revolution is also helping to
fuel the twin abuses of dowry and domestic violence. Santi Rozario
investigates
10 - 12 - 2007

Over the last two to three decades rural Bangladeshi society has
experienced a complex range of developments. Among these, NGOs,
micro-finance institutions and garment industries have become the
major agents of change in the lives of rural Bangladeshi women.
Women's increased access to independent sources of finance, through
participation in outside paid employment or through micro-credit, is
usually taken as one of the main indicators of the improvement of
women's status and of women's empowerment.

However, a puzzle remains: if these positive changes have resulted in
women's "empowerment", why has there not been the kind of improvements
in women's position that might be expected, such as the reduction or
abolition of dowry payments, or a reduction in domestic violence?
Indeed, if anything these tend to be going in the opposite direction.
Dowry amounts continue to rise, as does the associated violence
against women.

Also on micro-finance in Bangladesh:

Farida Khan, "Muhammad Yunus: an economics for peace"

It is true that individual women, women's organisations and other NGOs
continue to struggle against these problems. Yet, despite all this
effort, women continue to be subject to demands for large amounts of
dowry as a condition for acceptance by their groom's family. Married
women are also frequently subjected to physical and psychological
violence by their husbands and in-laws if they cannot keep bringing in
more and more dowry, especially within the first few years of their
marriage.

Understanding dowry

To understand the seemingly intractable problem of dowry, we need to
understand the rationale behind the practice. Dowry practices in
Bangladesh (the demand or dabi from grooms' families) are a relatively
new phenomenon. Their rise is linked to the capitalist transformation
of the Bangladeshi economy since the late 1960s and the resultant
disjunction between the demands of the economy and the system of
values in Bangladeshi society.

This has led to a valorization of men and devalorization of women,
legitimated both by a socially created surplus of marriageable women
compared to men, and also by the threat posed to ideas of women's
purity and honour by women's increasing physical mobility. All this in
turn has made it possible for dowry to become a critical source of
capital for families with sons, who are an increasingly prized
commodity.

These new negative developments in relation to women and dowry can be
understood better by appreciating that in Bangladeshi culture marriage
and dependence upon your husband is thought essential for women. By
'dependence' I mean both perceived and real economic dependency as
well as the moral or cultural dependency of all women on one or
another adult man of their family. The necessity for all women to be
married, along with the perceived 'risks' posed by an unmarried woman
to her family's honour, means that families feel pressured to marry
off their daughters as soon as possible after puberty. This lowers the
marriage age for women, so creating a perceived surplus of women in
relation to men, who are not under the same pressure to marry and so
generally marry later in life. This again leads to further inflation
of dowries and to the further devaluing of women - economically,
culturally and morally - in relation to men.

Also in openDemocracy on the 16 Days theme, part of our overall 50.50
coverage, a multi-voiced blog with contributions from women and men
around the world

Other articles in the 16 Days series include:

Roja Bandari, "Iran's women: listen now!"

Rahila Gupta, "The UK's modern slavery shame"

Takyiwaa Manuh, "African women and domestic violence"

Anne-Marie Goetz and Joanne Sandler "War and sexual violence"

Rebecca Barlow, "Women and conflict"

Jameen Kaur, "India's silent tragedy

Beyond the law

Dowry was declared illegal in Bangladesh in 1980. However, like many
other laws in Bangladesh this has had little or no impact. When faced
with demands for large dowries, families are reluctant to take legal
action for fear of losing suitable grooms. Thus villagers will say
that if one family takes legal action, no other potential grooms will
come forward to ask to marry a girl from that village in future. While
there are para-legal staff in some rural villages, poor people only
seek their assistance when a woman has been divorced after repeated
demands for more and more dowry, combined with extensive violence.
Families never report cases when dowry is demanded during marital
negotiations.

When I asked several groups of poor women what was their biggest
problem during some recent research for CARE Bangladesh, their almost
unanimous answer was "dowry". When I asked about violence, I heard
numerous stories about how most of the violence against women was
related to their parents' inability to meet the demands of husbands
and their families for more and more money or other goods.

Dowry has come to be one of the most critical sources of capital for
all families. It is not only practiced as a one-off payment during
marriage, but many families continue to use their newly-married
incoming wives as an ongoing source of capital, by sending them back
to their natal home again and again to bring back more capital. If the
wives' families cannot oblige, the wives are subjected to violence, or
even divorce.

One such woman I spoke to, Ruksana, is the second of four sisters from
a poor family. She was married to her cousin Ataul, and her parents
paid 80,000 Bangladeshi Taka as dowry. After the marriage her
mother-in-law mistreated her and demanded a bicycle, some jewellery
and additional Tk30,000. Ruksana's mother took a Tk7000 loan from
Grameen Bank, bought a cycle and made some ear-rings in the hope that
the mother-in-law (her own brother's wife) would treat her daughter
better, but Ruksana was pressured for more money. Ruksana did not want
to tell her parents since they were already struggling to keep up
payments on the first loan and could not afford enough food. Her
mother-in-law then tricked her into signing divorce papers (she was
told the papers were to obtain another loan), forced her to return to
her parents' house, and arranged a new marriage for Ataul.

The dark side of micro-credit

This is where micro-credit has contributed to the escalation of dowry.
While micro-credit has benefited large sections of the rural
population in many ways, it has also worked against women's solidarity
and contributed heavily to the inflation of dowry. Grooms' families
are aware that money is available to brides' families more easily now,
through Grameen Bank, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee
(BRAC) or other NGOs. I have often heard of women being sent home to
persuade their parents to borrow money from an NGO for their husbands
to invest in business, including buying items such as rickshaws, vans,
grocery shops or irrigation pumps.

Although in theory micro-finance institutions do not lend money for
the purposes of dowry payment, in practice it is common knowledge
among the barefoot bankers (micro-finance institution employees
distributing and collecting loans among village people) that most
village families depend on micro-credit to meet dowry demands.

It is because of such near universal dependence of men on their wives'
families for capital that dowry has come to be perceived by women's
organisations as intractable and as 'too political' a problem to
tackle directly.

Dismantling the hierarchy

Notwithstanding certain structural constraints, I still believe there
are ways to arrest the problem of dowry, and in my work for CARE I
made a number of recommendations. They include; collaboration between
institutions working for women's rights to campaign on dowry,
inheritance rights and domestic violence; development of a large-scale
rural legal aid service following the model already developed by Ain o
Salish Kendra (ASK) and the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee
(BRAC); working with religious authorities; use of media, education
and role models to contest village stereotypes of women.

Another key point to consider is that the perpetuation of dowry and
violence against women cannot only be blamed on men, particularly poor
men. It is actually the middle-class families, who keep their women
relatively sheltered in order to protect their purity and honour, and
compete most heavily for status hierarchy through dowry displays, who
are most responsible for perpetuating both dowry practices and gender
domination.

Middle-class women too gain from this status hierarchy. They demand
dowry for their sons, are relatively able to pay large dowry for their
daughters, and play active roles in maintaining their superior status
in relation to less well-off women. As a result, they are often the
people least willing to reject the dowry system. It is hard to see how
things will change for poor village families when they are taken for
granted by the rural and urban middle classes, who act as moral
arbiters for the society as a whole.

In tackling the problem of middle class attitudes, a piecemeal
approach may work. In the shorter term, the younger middle class
generation, who might have studied abroad and returned to Bangladesh,
and do not necessarily share the same values to their parents, could
be targeted. They are more often prepared to challenge familial
values, for instance by marrying someone of their own choice without
involvement of dowries.

There also needs to be a dialogue between the women's organisations -
especially legal ones such as Ask and the Bangladesh National Women
Lawyers' Association (BNWLA) - and religious leaders. I believe if
there is the political will on the part of the government, women's
organisations, religious leaders, large NGOs and civil society in
general, religious leaders can be used quite effectively in addressing
the problem of dowry and violence against women. There is some
precedence for this; in recent years religious leaders have been used
very successfully in motivating large sections of the village people
into accepting contraceptives within a relatively short space of time.

Finally, education is frequently recommended as a solution to all
sorts of problems in Bangladeshi society. I would recommend the same,
but with less emphasis on rote learning and more on educating the
young so they begin to question gender and other structural
hierarchies very early in life.