Why Anti-Dowry Laws Don’t Work
A financial partnership deal must include financial consideration
Unromantically speaking, marriage is the commencement of an economic partnership between two individuals.
Why Anti-Dowry Laws Exist?
In dependent societies like those in India, after marriage the bride typically moves in with the groom’s family, and unlike in independent societies like those in the West, the couple doesn’t find a place for just the two of them. As the bride settles into the new household, she will need to engage in various levels of power negotiation with her husband and members of her husband’s household[1]. The finances that the bride brings to the joint family can be a major factor in these negotiations.
In order to settle into a dignified power position of honor, the bride may be coerced during these negotiations to bring more finances to the table, mostly in the form of dowry[2], which is an income or share of inheritance that the bride brings into the new household. Married and located at the husband’s household, a bride lacks the “home advantage” throughout the negotiation and is severely disadvantaged. Often the bride may be subject to physical harm or even death during the process.
Anti-Dowry laws intend to protect the disadvantaged bride from physical and mental harm during these negotiations by taking finances off the table by outright banning the practice of giving the bride a dowry[2].
Are Anti-Dowry laws effective?
No. Dowry is still a prevalent practice. Moreover, Anti-Dowry laws have the negative effect of taking several essential financial transactions around marriage underground, boosting black money.
Such laws have, however, achieved some benefits like giving a deterrence to brides in certain households against significant mental and physical harm from abuse and to prosecute abusive criminals. However, many women still continue to get abused for more dowry and commit suicide, indicating an overall ineffectiveness.
Why?
A marriage registered with the state serves the sole purpose of commencing an economic partnership between two individuals[3][4]. Typically, in states with community property laws, any property (and debt) acquired after marriage is jointly owned by the spouses and must be equally redistributed upon divorce. Every non-economic aspect of building a family can be executed outside the state framework, say, solely within a religious framework, and be socially acceptable.
Any law that outright bans financial transactions from a financial partnership is unlikely to be effective
Are there alternatives?
Instead of banning dowry, laws should necessitate prenuptial agreements that specifically state what a bride and groom financially brings to the partnership and what the bride and groom is entitled to if the partnership dissolves, in the event of a divorce.
Prenuptial agreements are still not prevalent even in independent societies like the US. Only about 5% of marriages in the US have prenuptial agreements. In socially dependent cultures with indirect communication and where dowry is common, lawmakers may need to step in to motivate open, and possibly written, pre-marriage conversations around finances, especially, how the couple plans to fund their family, and the likely sources of finances.
Prenuptial agreements can also serve a secondary purpose to help ensure that girl children get a fair share of inheritance.
Further, the state may necessitate that when a prenup is absent, husband and wife maintain separate bank accounts, and for funds gifted to the bride at the time of marriage, she has the sole discretion on such funds for certain years and impose conditions on how her financial assets are withdrawn or mortgaged in relation to how the financial assets of groom are withdrawn or mortgaged.
Summary
Correctly identifying a problem is very important for resolution. Today’s anti-dowry laws cast under a socialist mindset project most financial transactions in a marriage as villainous and outright bans them. This is probably a reflection of many societies where one tries to avoid a problem — dowry deaths? Ban dowry — rather than face it in order to solve it. This is not working in the society and needs to change !
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Notes and References
- This kind of power negotiation is prominent in honor driven societies like India, where one’s self-worth in the society is dynamic and socially claimed, unlike in dignity driven societies like in the US or Europe where one’s self worth is self-determined or unlike face driven societies like in East Asia where one’s self worth is socially conferred and stable. BRETT, JEANNE M., Negotiating Globally — How to Negotiate Deals, Resolve Disputes, and make decisions across cultural boundaries, THIRD EDITION
- The term dowry is loosely defined and includes monetary and non-monetary gifts conferred to bride or groom by the bride’s family at the time of marraige, and may or may not include the bride’s inheritance from her family.
- The benefits of state granted legitimacy of gay marriage is more often hailed at times when gay couple get divorced since framework for amicable separation of finances in a divorce has been long established.
- https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/06/gay-marriage-gay-divorce/592006/
