Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Six years after the anti-Christian communal violence of 2008 in Kandamal district of Odisha state in India, justice and peace remain illusive to survivors of the violence. The book ‘Breaking the Shackled Silence’ documents and analyses the violence and its aftermath as seen and experienced by women. It examines the present status of women and girls affected by the violence, vis-à-vis their enjoyment of Constitutionally-guaranteed civil, political, social, economic and cultural rights. Drawn from conversations held with over 300 women and girls from Kandhamal and beyond, this report accentuates the hitherto unheard voices of women from Kandhamal.

In September 2013, there were anti-Muslim attacks in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts of Uttar Pradesh - a state in India. This report is based on a visit to relief camps in January 2014, and recounts the present status of victim-survivors of the violence, more particularly women and girls - the challenges they face and the extent to which reparative justice has been rendered.

The article discusses sexual and gender-based crimes in mass violence in India. It draws upon five different contexts of mass violence - communal (religion-based) violence, caste-based violence, violence in the context of militarization, violence in the context of anti-people development, and dispossession / violence in anti-Naxal operations.

In the second part of the article, it discusses gaps in Indian legal jurisprudence which are major causative factors for the existing impunity, and pose challenges to justice.

As a logical corollary, the third part discusses relevant law reform initiatives that are in process, to address the challenges to justice. In critiquing such …