Remedial, Institutional or Radical? Explaining Community Responses to Violence against Women in an NGO Programme to Prevent Violence in Mumbai, India

"As programme planners and policymakers seek to mobilise communities to address VAW, a better understanding of how communities make choices about what action they take is desirable."

Community mobilisation - a holistic and participatory process in which communities challenge the broad social and institutional structures that perpetuate violence against women (VAW) - is recognised as a critical approach to preventing VAW. Community action - individual or coordinated action taken by community members to challenge the social determinants of violence and to identify and support survivors - remains a key pillar of this approach. This study of community action to address VAW in a violence prevention programme by the non-governmental organisation (NGO) SNEHA (Society for Nutrition, Education and Health Action), sought to answer two questions: (i) What strategies do community members follow in responding to incidents of VAW in informal settlements in Mumbai, India? (ii) How does neighbourhood context influence community members' choice of strategy?

The study's exploration of how communities make choices about what action they take to address VAW rests on two concepts:

• Social capital, which is the aggregate characteristics of neighbourhoods that facilitate collective action, such as the presence of social networks, social cohesion, and interpersonal trust, may shape the degree to which residents expect support from neighbours in tackling cases of VAW.
• State capacity, which is the extent to which state institutions such as local government and the police are effectively governed and wield power locally, may shape the extent to which communities believe in institutional solutions to VAW.

Social norms theory stresses the role of collective attitudes and expectations in sanctioning or mandating violence to uphold unequal gender roles. In the informal settlements in Mumbai, where this study took place, gender norms often view managing the household and preserving family honour as central features of womanhood and justify domestic violence as a penalty for transgressing the husband's wishes. Street sexual harassment, robbery, theft, and gang crime are common, but residents often refrain from seeking help from police, who may ask for bribes. SNEHA runs a community-based programme to prevent VAW in this context, involving community engagement, counselling, and collaboration with institutional services.

Data collection took place in 2021-2022 across two large informal settlements in Mumbai: Dharavi and Govandi. The researchers conducted a grounded theory study involving 30 focus group discussions and 36 semi-structured interviews with 113 community members and 9 SNEHA staff, as well as over 170 hours of field observation. Informed by comparative case study methods, they used codes to compare and analyse variation in community actions in response to incidents of VAW across six informal settlement neighbourhoods.

Community members indicated that participation in SNEHA activities had changed them and their neighbourhoods. They felt better informed about women's rights, more capable of identifying gender inequality and domestic violence, and more confident in navigating interactions with the police or legal system. Respondents described becoming more active in supporting women facing violence after joining SNEHA. They became better at noticing incidents of violence, learning how to act and what to say, growing more confident and less fearful, and establishing an emotional commitment to addressing VAW. Residents remarked that they now talked about VAW where they had remained silent previously.

While community members voiced greater confidence in their general ability to intervene after joining SNEHA, the researchers found major variation in reports of how they acted in practice. They identified three major types of strategy adopted by community members in responding to incidents of VAW:

• Remedial action: The overall aim of this strategy was to resolve conflict and restore equilibrium to familial and community relationships with minimal disruption. Resolution was thought best achieved by involving as few people as possible to limit gossip and avoiding action that might escalate tensions and disputes or invite backlash. Seen through this lens, the involvement of police or women's organisations was undesirable, as it escalated a "private matter" into a public issue and involved potentially powerful "outsiders" to the neighbourhood in the dispute. These community members preferred interventions such as scolding perpetrators, reassuring and helping survivors with practical needs, and asking couples to reconcile their disagreements. These responses could border on victim blaming.
• Institutional action: This strategy sought to rely on formal institutions such as SNEHA, other NGOs, local government, and the police to address survivors' needs. Institutions were thought to have more resources, expertise, and authority than ordinary community members. "Institutional" did not mean "non-violent", as police were reported to use physical violence against perpetrators under arrest.
• Radical action: This strategy entailed confrontation and often violence as a means of addressing VAW. It included threatening or carrying out physical attacks on perpetrators, liaising with local gangs to threaten perpetrators, telling survivors of violence to hit back at perpetrators, or participating in violent mass protest and property destruction. Use of this strategy was also often motivated by concerns beyond the welfare of the survivor, such as the desire to achieve justice for survivors, challenge systemic corruption, penalise perpetrators for their behaviour, or exact revenge.

The variation in the type of action taken across neighbourhoods was not arbitrary, but reflected systematic cost-benefit considerations in heterogeneous environments, accounting for factors such as trust in neighbours, violent (armed or gang-related) crime, and corruption in state institutions. Neighbourhoods lacking in social capital engaged primarily in remedial action, as residents felt insufficiently protected from reprisal to escalate matters to the institutional level or take the law in their own hands. Residents of neighbourhoods with ample social capital and state capacity took institutional action, as they felt collectively empowered to make institutions act in their interest. At the intersection of strong social capital and weak state institutions, residents took radical action, having the collective means to act but not the motivation to work with corrupt institutions.

Social capital mattered because community members and SNEHA staff recommended acting collectively rather than alone. Collective action was more likely to inspire confidence in interveners. Police and local government were often reported to dismiss complaints from individual women - even in neighbourhoods with greater institutional trust - unless survivors came with a group of neighbours or a second institutional actor, such as a SNEHA officer. Radical action involving disruptive protest or threats benefited from large crowds, which were more intimidating than single individuals.

State capacity influenced choice of strategy as timely responses to requests for help generated trust, while the opposite happened when police dismissed pleas or solicited bribes. People who had intervened in neighbourhoods with high state capacity voiced confidence in their helpfulness.

Thus, the findings indicate that community action should not be treated as a unitary construct. The types of actions taken by community members vary substantially and systematically, and the researchers caution against maximising community action without a clear vision of the type of action hoped for. "If non-violent institutional resolutions to cases of VAW are desired, intervention designers must simultaneously strengthen social capital and state capacity and promote non-violent, anti-oppressive practices in both communities and state institutions."

Per the researchers, what is required going forward it "truly intersectoral interventions bringing together community members, health and social services, and the criminal justice system to end VAW."