Describe those social changes which have contributed to increase of violence against women. What are the emerging forms of violence against women ? Suggest suitable measures to contain this problem.

Breaking down the question

The question has three sequential demands, each of which must be answered on its own terms. First, describe the social changes that have contributed to an increase in violence against women — the emphasis on changes signals that the examiner wants a dynamic account, showing why violence has risen or become more visible in a transforming society, not a static description of patriarchy. Second, identify the emerging forms of violence — the newer manifestations that older accounts did not capture. Third, suggest measures to contain the problem.

The analytical crux lies in the first part. A superficial answer treats violence as a timeless constant; a sociological answer explains it as bound up with the very processes of modernisation, urbanisation and women's advancement. The apparent paradox — that violence can increase precisely as women gain rights — is best understood through the backlash thesis: as women contest patriarchal boundaries, patriarchal power reasserts itself through coercion.

Keeping the three parts distinct while linking them through a single argument about patriarchy under stress is what produces a coherent thirty-mark answer.

How to approach it

Build the answer in three clearly demarcated blocks, framed by a strong opening that defines violence against women as structural rather than incidental. A strong response will:

• Explain the social changes — urbanisation and anonymity, women in public space and paid work, the erosion of old controls, commodification through media and the market, and the backlash of a threatened patriarchy.
• Catalogue emerging forms — cyber-stalking and online abuse, sexual harassment at the workplace, sex-selective abortion, trafficking, and violence linked to dowry and consumerism.
• Offer measures across legal, institutional, economic and cultural fronts.
• Anchor the analysis in Uma Chakravarti on Brahmanical patriarchy, Leela Dube on gendered kinship and Sylvia Walby on structures of patriarchy.

For supporting material, see our notes on violence against women.

Model answer

Violence against women is not a random aggregation of individual crimes but, as feminist sociology insists, a structural feature of a patriarchal order — a mechanism by which male dominance over women's bodies, labour and sexuality is enforced. Sylvia Walby's account of patriarchy as a system operating through paid work, the household, the state, culture, sexuality and violence provides a frame in which violence is one interlocking pillar among several. Understood this way, the question is why this pillar has grown more prominent in a changing India.

Several social changes are implicated. The first is urbanisation and migration. The movement of populations into cities dissolves the dense kinship surveillance of the village, producing anonymity in which both the old restraints on women and the old informal protections weaken; women navigate public spaces — streets, transport, workplaces — that were previously closed to them, and this new visibility exposes them to new risks.

The second is the entry of women into education and paid employment. As women step into arenas of autonomy and earning, they challenge the patriarchal monopoly over public life and household authority. This challenge provokes what scholars call a backlash: a threatened masculinity responds to the loss of unquestioned control with heightened coercion. Uma Chakravarti's concept of Brahmanical patriarchy helps here, showing how control over women's sexuality is tied to the maintenance of caste and property, so that women's assertion is experienced as a threat to the whole social order.

The third is commercialisation and the commodification of women. The expansion of the market and mass media has projected women increasingly as objects of consumption and display, while consumerism has intensified the dowry demand, converting marriage into a transaction and the bride into a means of accumulation — with dowry violence its lethal outcome. Leela Dube's work on how kinship and property socialise girls into subordination illuminates why the daughter remains devalued even amid rising prosperity.

The fourth is the incomplete character of social change itself. Values have changed unevenly: women's aspirations have advanced faster than the attitudes of families, communities and institutions, and this normative lag — modern claims meeting traditional controls — is a fertile source of conflict and coercion. Rising reportage, driven by growing awareness and the courage to name violence, also makes visible what was previously hidden, so that part of the apparent increase reflects a welcome unveiling.

The emerging forms of violence reflect these changes. Technology has produced cyber-stalking, online harassment, the non-consensual circulation of images and digital blackmail — violence that follows women into virtual space. The workplace has generated sexual harassment as women's employment expands. Reproductive technology has enabled sex-selective abortion, a pre-natal violence against the female foetus. The market has fed trafficking and the commercial sexual exploitation of women and girls. Consumer aspiration has sharpened dowry harassment and dowry deaths. Alongside these, older forms — domestic cruelty, honour crimes and custodial violence — persist and adapt.

Containing the problem requires a multi-pronged response. Legally, the framework must be not only enacted but enforced through gender-sensitive policing, swift adjudication and dignified treatment of survivors, since a statute unimplemented is a paper promise. Institutionally, shelters, helplines, fast-track courts and support services give victims a real route to redress. Economically, women's employment and property rights reduce the dependence that traps women in violent situations. Culturally — and most fundamentally — the transformation of gender socialisation through education, media and the sustained work of women's movements is essential, for law addresses the act while only cultural change touches the structure that produces it. Engaging men and boys in redefining masculinity is indispensable to that shift.

In the final analysis, violence against women has increased not because society has failed to change but because it is changing unevenly: women are advancing into a public world whose patriarchal foundations have not yet been dismantled. Containing it means completing that transformation.

Examiner's perspective

Examiners reward candidates who grasp the paradox at the heart of the question — that violence can rise even as women progress — and who explain it through the backlash of a patriarchy under stress rather than treating violence as a fixed constant. The three parts must all be addressed; scripts that answer only the causes, or only the measures, are capped.

The distinction that lifts an answer is the framing of violence as structural, backed by Walby, Chakravarti and Dube, and the linking of emerging forms directly to the social changes described — cyber-violence to technology, dowry deaths to consumerism, harassment to women's employment. This shows integrated reasoning rather than a disconnected list. The strongest scripts close with measures that distinguish law as recognition from culture as transformation. Weak answers describe crimes; strong answers explain the sociology of a patriarchal order resisting its own erosion.