Gender-Based Violence in Mumbai, India: International NGO Failures and Legacy Barricades

Gender-based violence is not confined by national borders, nor does it discriminate between the wealthy and poor. There is no one attribute of a country that causes it, and there is no one solution to eradicating it. In the case of Mumbai, India a number of historic and traditional factors have aided the continuation of violence against women. International NGOs such as the Human Rights Watch, United Nations Children’s Fund, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations Human Rights Council have all sent assemblages of volunteers and violence mediators to Mumbai studying the symptoms of abuse and publishing their findings to the world. They have remained for decades, without understanding the rooted gender-based violence to the city, and have unwittingly elevated levels of violence by placing women and girls at the front line of India’s gender dichotomy