Tamil Nadu Police Training Initiatives in
Dealing with Domestic Dispute/Violence Petitions/Cases

K. Radhakrishnan, IPS
Inspector-General of Police
Tamil Nadu

Several factors have been identified that hold back women from functioning to their full potential and get into the mainstream. These can be broadly classified as;

· Personal factors
· Psychological glass ceiling
· Social factors
· Structural factors

Though factors have been identified as distinct issues under these broad categories, they are all interrelated, reinforcing one another.

Personal Factors

Women, especially from traditional families, are constantly bombarded with negative feedback about their capabilities leading to a low self esteem about themselves. Further, they are conditioned to keep a low profile resulting in low career aspirations. These two together make them feel intimidated by male colleagues. Those who overcome these factors and do manage to get into a profession face the conflict between affiliation and power and have to often compromise and trade of between balancing home and career. This at times results in the women's reluctance to accept greater responsibilities in her profession as she feels guilty that the family would suffer. It is still a male dominated society and gender discrimination and bias still exists and some women just do not have the skill to handle the challenges of discrimination.

Psychological Glass Ceiling

In addition to the above personal factors identified, there are several other psychological inhibitions which form self created glass ceiling for women. Some women lack the powerful motivation driven by a sense of meaning to achieve something significant in their career. At times a job is just an additional income to the family. Without this passion for achievement, women do not develop a capacity for risk taking. While women are in no way less intelligent than men, women at times lack the ability to focus their intelligence on their career due to other priorities. This naturally results in their inability to find and define great problems to work on. Some women opt out and make a conscious decision not to compete in hierarchies and individually. All these factors combined results in the women's lack of ability to tolerate, persist and learn from failure. Due to the double standards that exist in society women are expected to be nurturing and caring and not be aggressive and pushing like men. Here women need significant skills to deal with difficult people and at times women give up. The stereotype that exists in society does not approve of women who are independent and powerful while this same is admired and encouraged in men. These are some of the factors that hold back women in being assertive and demand their rightful place in their career.

Social Factors

The society being still highly patriarchal in nature, the status of women in general is rather low. The way the girl child is socialized in relation to the boy child differs enormously setting different standards and norms for men and women. This process of socialization prepares women differently from men to face the challenges of a career, especially in a highly male dominated profession like police. The women is seen by the family as wife and mother and not as a career police women. There are several cultural barriers for women while men can get away flouting them. Further, many women lack support in the family for their career. Women's career is not taken as seriously as that of the men. Unless a women is able to cope with all these hindering factors, her being assertive and getting into the mainstream of her career is an uphill task indeed.

Structural Factors

The issue starts from the stage of recruitment itself. At times the standards set are not women friendly. There are women exclusive criteria which keeps women out for certain types of assignments keeping them out of the mainstream. Gender stereotypes and bias keeps women in certain so called feminine roles like desk jobs, soft assignments etc.

The study of Joshi and Pande (1999), based on data obtained from 350 men and 350 women in the police service and 350 men and women in the public, throws some interesting light on this aspect as shown in box.

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