In 2008, Manjula Datta O’Connor was working as a psychiatrist in private practice in Melbourne’s CBD, generally seeing lots of corporate clients, when one day a “highly distressed” Indian student arrived for an appointment. The woman told O’Connor she had a “dowry problem”: her husband and his sister-in-law were denigrating her for not giving enough dowry, wanting more cash and to control her income. When she refused, “this led to violence, verbal abuse, and castigation”.
Soon, O’Connor had a run of Indian women – possibly reflecting increased numbers of overseas students arriving in Australia – presenting with similar stories.
“I recognised the pattern. It was similar to that found in India,” she says. “There was no knowledge or awareness of this problem in Australia, yet it was giving rise to mental illnesses, and suicides and murders.”
“Most South Asian homes are peaceful and harmonious,” says O’Connor, but dowry abuse is a recognised issue. The offer or request of dowry itself, a widespread practice in several cultures, is not considered abusive; rather, abuse, O’Connor says, is the “distortion of a well-meaning ancient cultural practice,” where gifts or money provided by the bride’s family – intended to assist the bride in her married life – are extorted by the groom and his family and when a woman’s value and worthare determined by the wealth she delivers.
According to O’Connor, dowry abuse is the key driver in most cases of domestic abuse in the South Asian migrant community. While some women can also face other forms of abuse, for example threats to withdraw visa sponsorship if they don’t comply with a spouse, “when you actually really dig down right at the bottom, it all starts with dissatisfaction with the amount of stuff she brought into the marriage”.
The women O’Connor was treating in her psychiatry practice were highly traumatised. “I’d find these women were in an extremely high state of anxiety and hypervigilance. They haven’t slept [properly] often for months. They haven’t eaten properly for months. They were anaemic.
“Often their blood pressures were high when they’ve never had any blood pressure problem before. Headaches, panic attacks, severe anxiety, depression, feeling suicidal.”
The women O’Connor sees are just the tip of the iceberg. A recent national survey of the South Asian community led by O’Connor revealed that 32% of respondents suffered dowry abuse, or knew someone who had.
A personal puzzle
This month sees the release of O’Connor’s book, Daughters of Durga. Writing it was an opportunity for O’Connor to put down everything she has learned about the phenomenon of dowry abuse, but it was also a chance for her to puzzle out her own character – and the anti-authoritarian streak she has had since she was a child.
Growing up in Delhi, O’Connor’s father was loving, kind and selfless, but also at times controlling. Writing this book, she realised, “I do think I’ve had anger about that oppression … and most of my life I think I pushed back against him in little ways all the time.
“Maybe what I’m doing is partly because of my relationship with my father?”
While O’Connor’s father would not allow her mother to work outside the family home, he always wanted Manjula to become a doctor, and gave her access to the best education possible – something she credits with being hugely formative.
“At med school, we were the hip generation. We were the modern generation. We were the generation that was going to be not like our parents, not afraid of anything,” she says. “There were all those number of factors that created this brave, fearless kind of an attitude … That’s partly what education does to you.”
Diving into her childhood re-surfaced a pivotal memory. One day, in Delhi, a white woman turned up at the family home asking to see her uncle. While her uncle refused to come out, denying knowledge of the woman, even as a child O’Connor understood they must have had an affair. “And I remembering thinking, ‘that’s a possibility. You don’t have to be married within your own culture, do you?’”
Perhaps this planted a seed. Many years later, she fell in love with – and married – a country boy from Australia, moving straight from Delhi to her new parents-in-law’s farm in western Victoria, where “lamb chops and three veg” quickly became her favourite food in what was “the most beautiful time of my life”.
‘Dead-set against me’
Years later, in 2012, O’Connor co-founded the Australasian Centre for Human Rights and Health – an NGO set up to campaign against dowry abuse and domestic violence in migrant communities.
“After our campaign started,” she says, “the patriarchal structures of our community were dead-set against me because they thought I was shaming the community by naming dowry abuse specifically, and that they wanted it to be left alone.
“But I was of the opinion that it needs to be named, otherwise the women themselves will not recognise it and the domestic violence service providers will not know it and the police will not know what to do. The magistrates will not know what to do.”
O’Connor says there has been “constant pushback” over the past decade as she has spoken out about domestic violence and dowry abuse within her community.
She has been undeterred by the resistance, which has included social isolation, whispering campaigns claiming her cause is “fake” and that she is just trying to get more patients into her psychiatric practice.
“As if I don’t have a waiting list in my practice for patients already!” she says.
“Every time I heard something like that, the next day in my practice, I would see five or six girls crying, desperate, telling me awful stories. Now, who should I be moved by? It was very simple in my mind,” she says.
The work to do
Dowry abuse is now recognised in Victoria’s Family Violence Protection Act and while awareness is not uniform or consistent, there is growing recognition among police, immigration officials and service providers that women they interact with may be experiencing this.
“Certainly, by breaking the silence, what we have done is that women are not sitting and taking it until they’re killed. They’re much more coming out and seeking help in large numbers, but we are still not reaching everyone,” says O’Connor.
In 2020, a local police officer discovered that over the preceding year there had been a cluster of seven Indian women who died by suicide in the Melbourne suburb of Epping. Analysis showed that five of the seven women had a documented history of family violence. All were new immigrants, living on the outskirts of the city; the majority did not have a drivers’ licence or a job.
O’Connor has analysed her own clinical caseload of South Asian women who have escaped domestic abuse, discovering 75% had suicidal thoughts with 17% acting upon these thoughts.
“There is an immigrant women’s domestic violence service in Victoria,” says O’Connor. “But there’s only one service. We need at least three or four of those services ... The women are not getting the help they need.”
O’Connor’s next goal is to start a conversation in India. It is work, though, that is not without burden.
“It’s a double-edged sword in the sense that yes, I do feel it’s really good that everybody now knows and the women themselves know that they will be heard by the system.
“I also am very mindful how the Indian community feels that I am naming and shaming it by calling out that word, ‘dowry abuse’,” she says. “They’re both feelings all the time in my mind.”
Daughters of Durga is out on 15 June through Melbourne University Press.
• In Australia, the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732 and Lifeline is on 13 11 14. In the UK, call the national domestic abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247, or visit Women’s Aid. In the US, the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Other international helplines may be found via www.befrienders.org.
