Indian laws, especially concerning marriage and divorce are extremely skewed towards women, in the sense that "its her word against yours" is almost a law unto itself.
Not long ago, a woman could go to a police station, give a complaint against her husband and family, and her husband, his relatives, even those living in other cities or even states had to be put in jail. There were numerous cases where educated urban women had their in laws families, including aging grandmothers put in jail, that was widely amplified by the media. This law, numbered 498a, wreaked havoc in the nation. The law was non bailable and once applied, cannot be withdrawn, even if the complainant wants to do so.
So you had a situation where, some urban women misused this law, causing whole families to be put in jail, without even as much as a preliminary enquiry, leading to chaos and a sure shot way for the marriage to breakdown. In a country where going to jail holds a lot of social stigma, no husband would ever want to reconcile with a wife who sent him to jail.
The law was, in intent, aimed at protecting vulnerable women, and in that intent, if used correctly, acts as a powerful deterrent to domestic violence, especially in rural areas.
However, for almost a decade, it was mainly used by urban and semi urban, educated women as a revenge tactic. The results in conviction rates, less than 5% for these cases, and the rapid increase in their numbers, lead to calls for reform. About 2 years back, the Supreme Court of India gave judgements & directed police departments to stop automatic arrests in such cases and only to make arrests after detailed enquiry. It observed that the intent of law was to reconcile and rehabilitate broken marriages due to domestic violence, but has now become a tool to harass husbands.
No wonder the society and men, especially ones with assets and reputations to lose, started to resort to such measures to protect themselves from false cases.
Edit : I would also like to add that normal divorce laws are also skewed towards women. They get favorable rulings in alimony, asset distribution, etc. Many of these 498a cases ended up being petty quarrels, where the wife wants to exact revenge, this was observed by Supreme Court too. The women did get their revenge by making their husband's families churn through the Indian court systems which are notorious for being slow and draining people financially, however, over-zealous usage and application of the law lead to dilution of a powerful law against those who actually suffer from domestic violence.
I can vouch for every single word you just said. I know an Indian guy who was doing residency in the US. Got married in India, his wife got him arrested under 498a. He spent 10 months in jail! Ridiculous.
I'm lucky my turn came after the supreme Court ruling you mentioned. Me or my family was not arrested, but we still had to shell up about 30,000 USD to my in laws, which was money will spent to be honest (as they agreed to give me full custody of my daughter).
I could have prevented all this my bugging my ex's phone. Why? Because it all happened so suddenly. Everything came down raining without even a hint from my ex. If I had a little bit intelligence of what she was cooking up, I could have even saved the marriage.
Jesus Christ, I have no frame of reference for someone thinking that they could and should have “saved” a marriage by electronically surveilling their partner who falsely accused them of a crime. Sounds like one of those teen dystopian novels.
Marriage is but a set of constraints designed to make two people cooperate to achieve a win-win scenario; If the two people actually trusted each other, they wouldn’t marry.
I've up voted though i vehemently disagree as I would love to engage in a discussion on that last sentence... I know many people who say that, but it always seems to end up a very narrow and uncommon definition somewhere.
In particular I find a lot of people Think of "marriage" as an external event driven thing - a ceremony, a signing, the guests, potentially the name change, and of course the laws and such.
Anyhoo, Do you essentially propose that no two people who trust each other would marry, and if so, why?
It feels like such a strongly universal statement that it cannot possible hold true...
It's not enough for the two people to trust each other because they have parents friends etc. These people, and societies norms are a huge influence on the decision to get married.
But I do think at the end it all boils down to trust. If marriege was not an external event, then why the ceremony? The rings? Etc? It's full of symbolism describing and alluding to your responsibilities and how you're going to be judged for not abiding to them.
So yes, in a world where two people have total trust, and society is more lenient in it's pressuring of norms marriege would be obsolete.
She was being led by her mother. She was to naive to believe her mother's bs. I could have tried to convince her that her mother is only taking her on a path of destruction.
FYI-- here's what a healthy relationship looks like:
1. Someone important to your beloved tries to convince your beloved of X.
2. Because trust extends in both directions between your beloved and you, your beloved tells you, "Someone important to me said to do X."
3. Because your beloved has agency, they follow that statement with something like, "I told them that this is what I think of X."
4. A conversation among two mature adults ensues, with the full range of human emotions in play.
You can do high-tech problem solving with 20/20 hindsight until you drive yourself crazy. But if you didn't have two-way trust, or at least one party didn't realize have adult-level agency, it wasn't a healthy relationship and you should move on to one that is
Seeing your writing inspires the possibility that all significant social processes can have their most critical elements be explicitly written in some form of symbolic language (likely English + additional symbols from math, logic, graphs, etc.). I wonder if there are books or people working on that topic?
Exactly how many Indian extended families have you dealt with? You need to act like Giuliani dealing with the mob if you want to preserve your independence (leverage over their assets, reputations, businesses etc) because they think they own everything. I jest, but not by much.
You can't fish someone out of the mob without them actively wanting to get out, and that requires the person start by relying on their own agency.
Look at the Nxivm cult-- a member was literally starving herself to death and even her own mom had to spend years patiently working with cult deprogrammers before she could convince her to leave (and on threat of FBI prosecution, at that).
Not only is it ineffectual to try to force that person back to sanity-- it's literally counterproductive. It plays into the mob's hand-- an outsider is trying to convince so-and-so to become a rat! You're not a rat, are you, so-and-so?
I'm sorry OP has to go through the heartache of coming to terms with this, if that is indeed anything like what they're going through. But I have to admit to being less concerned with your and OP's blanket warning about Indian families, and vastly more concerned that you and OP apparently think a broad statement like that could somehow justify tapping a loved one's phone. On HN of all places.
To be crystal clear-- if that mom of the Nxivm cult member had actually bugged her daughter's phone at any point in the saga, it would have shattered her trust with her mom and made it impossible for her to ever leave. You get that, right?
I'm not defending bugging the phone. That's a bridge too far for me. You would somehow need to threaten to get their business partners/people they have tea/hookah with in the neighborhood to think they're a bad person to have any leverage (or even more evil but effective when done in public, a bad Muslim/Hindu/X). You need to understand that these families see you as a cash cow or an object to barter to increase access to resources, preserve resources within the family, or increase social status and plan a response accordingly.
Case in point but with an (white) American family. I had a friend whose dad was welshing out on child support for his sisters. My (adult) friend called up a bunch of his dad's clients (he was a contractor) and calmly left messages explaining the situation. His dad paid up but also slapped him with a restraining order and they didn't talk for a decade. I mean being able to threaten going nuclear like that, not necessarily tapping phones, should be par for the course.
> I could have prevented all this my bugging my ex's phone. Why? Because it all happened so suddenly. Everything came down raining without even a hint from my ex.
I could sympathize until here. If you can't trust your partner why marry them in the first place? I find it hard to believe there weren't signs of things going wrong before she slapped a case on you.
> If you can't trust your partner why marry them in the first place?
There are a lot of nuances here, than just trust before marriage.
Many of the marriages are arranged ones, where the families arrange and negotiate the marriage. If the woman is not satisfied with any aspect of the marriage, some of them resort to these tactics to get rid of the husband.
Of course, there are those who actually suffer and are rescued by this law, but those are few and far between.
Exactly. Just for clarity, arranged doesn't mean forced. The woman in almost all cases gives a consent. And if she later regrets, this is the path she chooses instead of just leaving, and her parents usually support her. There are various reasons for choosing this path:
1. Free money.
2. Free sympathy from the society.
3. Feeling of revenge.
In addition to the three above reasons, many choose this path to "clear their name", as in "I am a victim", who deserves a second chance at marriage.
Remember that marriages for divorced women are extremely difficult in India. If the woman was separated from the husband, "as a victim", they have a better chance, especially if she is young.
However, due to severe misuse of the law, now the situation is such that any woman even as much linked to a court case regarding marriage issues, is effectively shunned from marriage.
> If you can't trust your partner why marry them in the first place?
People often marry under family and peer pressure. In such cases, trust becomes secondary. And many people realize it late that marriage is first and foremost a legal contract. Everything else comes after that.
Not true. These are mostly young age boys, after getting rejected by a girl for dating because she is not interested, reason being either genuine lack of interest in him, or in dating, or concerned about studies, or scared of their family. & Not all boys, only a single digit percentage of a one or two states. Most of these boys never went to school. & Most of the time it is never to kill, but just to scare, or make her ugly.
About a generation ago, till 2000s, married women used to get killed by in laws by getting poured kerosene oil. Story pushed was always that she was using kerosene oil stove, & oil tank exploded. Too common that songs were written in protest questioning how kerosene stove knows its the daughter in law? Why its always daughter in law? In songs girls used to request her father to not give her a stove as gift. Popularity of LPG gas, electric & such pushed kerosene away, & those cases almost now are unheard of.
what could have saved the marriage was to learn how to communicate without judging, and active listening to the partner. but that needs to be in place before the trust was broken. When one needs to resort to bugging the partners phone "for intel" the train has left the station (probably years before).
The partner is like an insider-threat from a security pov. Doing OpSec against a spouse is IMO impossible because the whole point of a romantic partner is to have somebody one can trust.
Some people will never believe love+trust should be the pillars of a relationship because that's not the model/framework they learned from their own parents.
The expectation is that it's only a matter of time for said partner to let them down (like they have seen it by their own parents in childhood). It's a self-fulfilling prophecy almost.
My ex tried to finish me off by forging signatures on some of my cheques (an old cheque-book she knew belongs to a closed account that book actually should have been destroyed by me), lies-lies-more lies, manipulate our kids with tactics such as repeatedly mentioning events that never happened ... She also became quickly physically violent so I had to call 911 a few times because I was terrified of further escalation (she would attempt to start physical fights by running to the kitchen to grab a knife ...
Getting rid of this abuse has costed me the relationship to my kids (they had been told by my spouse I was too lazy to bring them to school when in fact I was having severe PTSD/depression, and was not only unable to drive but also unable to walk from my bedroom to the kitchen to prepare a meal).
Another example was when I stood across the room making a cup of tea when she started screaming my son's name asking him to come quick and help. I was so confused that I didn't know what was happening - she literally told him I beat her and she needs his protections when I was at least 9ft away from her. I couldn't believe what happened at the time but now many years later know the purpose was to implant false memories. I never beat a woman in my whole life because it goes against everything I stand for. ... I have dozens of little horrible anecdotes just like this ...
Some relationship reach a point from which they never return. Others should have never happened in the first place. Hard to tell which is which (or what is healthy or correct) when you've run from abusive parents yourself. The correct (positive) reference model is not missing - it's totally incorrect.
India adds another twist: arranged marriages do not put value on love+romance before the wedding. It might all fall in place after a while but it's not a precondition.
I really hope you can see how messed up your post is in the fact that you honestly think that had you been spying on your wife the whole time you could have avoided any sort of mess and "saved your marriage". There is just too much too respond to on this. You have a daughter, shame on you, do you want some man spying on her watching every message and when he doesn't like what he sees maybe he will "fix his marriage" by doing something stupid like spousal abuse or attempt to stop her by controlling her probably by gaslighting her every move. What you suggested is not normal and you really should reflect on why you feel spying is a normal part of a relationship for you. Your belief that you need to spy probably extends to your entire way of being and that way of being is probably why she left you in the first place.
Not very different in the western world too. Canada has mandatory arrest policy if the wife or partner makes a domestic abuse allegation. But its bailable under strict conditions. There is no enquiry done by the police about the merits of allegation and always results in arrest on the spot. This sudden arrest traumatises the defendant, destroys his career, finances because the case wont be dropped even if no charges are pressed. The prosecution continues till guilty/not guilty. This is a very scary policy and makes men really question the idea of getting married, having kids or even to live with a partner under the same roof.
This system is skewed towards women and it has a very low conviction rate too. A waste of tax money. Courts are flooded with DV cases according to StatCan.
Well, OTH, where I come from there's no such directive, and we routinly see cases where a wife gets killed even after police is involved and the husband comes back home.
These women's life are OVER not ruined. And the physical reality of violence is heavily skewed towards males.
Sounds like an overly biased system. Yet I think it's clear why we can't have nice things: violent people exist and they hurt enough people that it's a common problem.
And without hard evidence the system will naturally skew towards protecting the physically weaker partner.
Section 498A was ridiculous. It allowed to rope in accused husbands’ relatives — including parents, minor children, siblings and grandparents. Kids who could hardly comprehend what's going on around them would be arrested along with their whole family in unsubstantiated dowry cases.
If independent India could send a space probe to the Moon, surely it could reform its legal system as well. Vast majority of Indians alive were born decades after the Raj ceased to exist.
Usually, when such old structures survive, it is because of concrete people and interest groups who want to keep them alive. And this is more of a domestic problem than a (ex-)colonial one.
In my country, compulsory identification cards were introduced by Nazis during the occupation. All subsequent regimes, including the democratic ones, kept them: too useful to scrap. But it would be misleading to say that we can "thank" Hitler for having cards in our pockets. We could have scrapped them if we wanted to, like we scrapped many other regulations and laws from that cursed era. We didn't.
This is quite interesting to learn. Most of what I have heard about India has been through the highly publicized rape cases where women were assaulted in broad daylight and those who assaulted them were not prosecuted
The law has teeth and that can be made to bite, if the woman is savvy enough to use it.
However, knowledge and applicability of the law is not fully understood in rural areas, the ones where domestic violence is a more pressing issue. Not that urban areas have less scope of DV, but that in urban areas, there are more options to the victim and a lot less social stigma.
Things are changing now. Due to prevalence of internet and penetration of mobiles and cheap smartphones into all strata of society, women are more knowledgeable than ever.
Rape and sexual assaults are issues that are, in my view, a universal issue, with only change between various countries in the world being the degree of reporting and recourse.
Even in that area, India is changing. Social stigma for reporting rape is very low in urban areas and rapidly reducing in rural areas. Women are more willing to report it and society is less stigmatic towards it.
One of the reason why there is constant news of rape.
>>However, knowledge and applicability of the law is not fully understood in rural areas, the ones where domestic violence is a more pressing issue.
The fact that have no better option B might have something to do with it too. Like in western countries: sure you can arrest your scumbag husband that beats you but then what?
I think you have your facts wrong. There was really only one incident that reached Western news media and four men were executed for the incident (the fifth killed himself). The police identified and captured suspects almost immediately after the incident and it went to the courts right after. So I’m not sure where the claim that they weren’t prosecuted is coming from. You can view the timeline of the incident at https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/19/asia/india-rape-execution...
Every now and then, a crime of such magnitude happens (the woman was assaulted to such an extent that her internal organs were damaged from iron rods inserted into her vagina, which speaks to more of cruelty and inhumanity, than the need for sexual gratification) that it captures the news cycle. This is the reason the case was quickly solved (quickly as in about 5 years)
But there are many rapes, that are not reported, or if reported, the victim seldom gets justice because of dragging in courts, etc.
And, in any judicial system, solid evidence is required, so rape of a woman in a field, at night, where she might not even remember the faces of her assaulters, might not have enough evidence, apart from circumstantial ones (in cases where the assaulters escaped), leading to no justice to her.
The scary thing is that the main perpetrator of that rape/murder was 17 years old and under Indian law couldn’t even be sentenced to a long prison term. He’s out and his name is unknown.
Those protests were mostly stupid. I agree there was anger and rage, but as you mentioned the arrests were swift. The protestors were basically demanding that the suspects be hanged immediately, without due process. Which is why I called it stupid.
> Indian laws, especially concerning marriage and divorce are extremely skewed towards women,
And that is because they needed to be.
- Indian women are still viewed by many family as a burden because of the pervasive dowry culture in indian society.
- Indian women are also expected to be a housewife / homemaker after she has kids and look after everyone's needs while being totally dependent on her husband / in-laws.
- Indian women are expected to give birth to sons.
- Most of them are married off between the age of 16-20 (18 is the legal age limit in India), sometimes even before they complete high school. (Child marriages are common too, but are reducing).
All these factors means that they are very vulnerable to the negative elements of indian society (of which there are many because it is a country of a billion+ people). The dowry factor means there is an incentive to not only harass woman for more money but also to get rid of them and marry again to get more dowry. (Before these laws were passed it was quite common to hear about wives being brutally abused and even killed for dowry. It still happens).
This is also why even the divorce laws are "skewed" in favour of the women in India. While indian men can re-marry more easily, indian women can't - indian society considers them as "damaged goods" because "she doesn't know how to keep a family together" (yes, the whole burden is only on her!).
More importantly, men view these divorce laws as "skewed" because of the alimony they have to pay. They feel outraged at the amount they have to pay to someone whom they now consider at the level of a "maid", rather than recognizing the sacrifice the women makes to be a house wife / home maker (a sacrifice that is sometimes forced upon her by society).
Indian laws are correcting the imbalance of power between a man and a woman in indian society. Sure, women are no saints. But they certainly are more than the men in India. (I know because I too am an indian guy who still has a tough time wrapping his head around how to perceive and treat women with what traditions and society expect from me vs the healthy respectful way).
Can you provide some insight on why distant relatives living in other cities would need to be jailed for this? I can't even think of a way this could be justified for the law when it was created initially.
There is nothing in the law that states that. However, it does say that all of the accused are to be jailed and produced before a magistrate for hearing and bail.
So women would simply provide a list of accused, and those living outside the home were purported to have directed her husband and in-laws over phone, linking them to her harrassment.
We have the same problem (minus the in laws part) in the US, here its called the, "silver bullet" [0]. I've been writing and speaking about it for about a year now and the consensus seems to be no one cares what happens to men.
These clauses are used by lawyers in civil disputes (divorce etc.) to speed up the legal proceedings by making it a criminal case, and to reduce the number of adjournments. Criminal conviction is not the real end here, it is a pressure tactic to get the civil judgment.
Note that India does not have a robust tradition of out-of-court settlement etc.
Conviction rates are misleading. They do not shed light on how and why these IPC clauses are invoked.
Another oncoming danger is POCSO - parents might use child molestation clauses against each other in civil disputes like divorce. See a recent judgment of Kerala High Court related to this instructing lawyers not to invoke this clause for frivolous purposes:
"a) That the allegations against all relatives of the husband cannot be taken at face value when in normal course it may only be the husband or at best his parents who may be accused of demanding dowry or causing cruelty and in order to check abuse of over implication, clear supporting material needs to be produced to proceed against other relatives of a husband"
"b) That there has been a growing tendency to abuse the said provision to rope in all the relatives including parents of advanced age, minor children, siblings, grand-parents and uncles on the strength of vague and exaggerated allegations without there being any verifiable evidence of physical or mental harm or injury which several times results in harassment and even arrest of innocent family members, including women and senior citizens."
"c)That misuse of Section 498A has also been judicially acknowledged in several cases."
"d) That in respect of relatives who are ordinarily residing outside India, the matter should proceed only if the Investigation Officer is convinced that arrest is necessary for fair investigation and In such cases impounding of passport or issuance of red corner notice should be avoided."
"e) That provision of counseling under Section 14 of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, should be made mandatory before registration of a case under Section 498A ."
1. Government mandates everyone to have Aadhaar card . In Aadhar card application form, there is option towards "sharing of data with third party" . Most People do tick that option. If they don't tick,there are chances that officers(mostly in bank where they take photo and biometric details of applicant) themselves tick that and apply for aadhar card.
2) Many colleges sell Students' Info, Phone number, Address for money. We get direct calls from coaching centre who didn't at all had our phone number.
3) When you buy something (say Domain name in Indian company),there are chances that they sell your information across many corporate interests without your consent.
> 3) When you buy something (say Domain name in Indian company),there are chances that they sell your information across many corporate interests without your consent.
Here's a fun experiment. Create a temporary email or an email alias & register it on naukri.com & watch your inbox get flooded with non-job related emails.
And here's another one, go to a local store for porting your sim, and receive a ton of calls for loan & credit cards (which unfortunately is quite common).
One of the most infuriating thing for me was having my biometric information taken and shared at all the the competitive examinations' test centres. To get into college, I had given 5-7 online competitive exams (JEE/BITSAT/UCEED/etc.), and at each centre I had to mandatorily have my fingerprint scanned. Their reason was probably to prevent cheating, but I won't be surprised if my fingerprint/name/phone number/address is out their being sold.
There's a lot of marriage mafia happening in india where female wouldn't divorce husband but live off his salary in their house which will be partitioned has the possibility of ownership as well. I know a family where the divorce ran for 30yrs, the lady seemed to wasted his life and career. She used to go to his office and scream at him and due to that embarassment he changes job often and he is not able to shift for work other city or country as well. He recently got divorce after 30 years now he is 55yrs.
So now a days guys tend to get some evidences by some spy tech filing divorce or clearing doubts.
Females are also scammed by guys after all analysis as well. People somehow tens to hide their loans and make their partners pay it off.
Regarding data, it can be got from anywhere. In the roadside store where people recharge mobiles, shopkeeper notes down names and number and address, that info can be bought. Nowadays easiest place in matrimony sites and from people who work there that's actually rich data where people describe about their family, status and groom or brides salary. Every year there data leakage from govt and private mobile companies with aadhaar details.
Hiring detectives are old school and works, some rich people do before marriage and social media analysis.
Target of the article and target audience is Indian based but it isn't like they are the only country with varying degrees of this crap going on. I wonder how bad will it get before something more meaningful is done?
Equifax survived leaking all that data. That still amazes me. Roughly 1 in 3 Americans had their PII leaked and they suffered minimal fines. Minimal in the fact that they certainly haven't been impacted operationally. If the laws can't punish that level of breach, they aren't going to punish the small potato sized ones either.
The intent behind spyware and Equifax's data leak are not comparable.
On one hand we have companies selling spyware for unlawful data collection (like wiretapping). On the other hand Equifax collects the data through partnerships and data-sharing arrangements that (whilst opaque to essentially all consumers) is generally well-regulated.
GDPR, the APPs and CCPA may curtail another Equifax incident but outright-illegal data collection needs a different solution.
Private Detectives are not regulated in India, they can operate without license and obviously they are into really shady stuff.
Their primary source of income is w.r.t marriages, but it is not just investigating the background of groom/bride, they are involved in sabotaging love (planting fake evidence, honey trap etc.) usually due to inter-caste/inter-faith relationships in the name of 'Investigating love cheats'.
Here is an interview by Neil Patel of one such Private Investigation 'Startup', where the founder proudly claims to ruin relationships on behalf of her clients (Parents of the couple in love) and Neil just laughs it off - https://open.spotify.com/episode/4TfTitGyHkcXrJJmiJBzFy
That was one of the worst guests I've ever heard on a podcast. Granted, maybe English isn't her first language, but the incoherent rambling stands out more in this format
I agree, but I would blame the host as well, any other host caring about their reputation would not have published this or at least done some reasearch on how PI operate in India.
India has a misogynistic society, dowry is still a major problem. Every year thousands of women are burned, killed and abated to suicide because of dowry. In parts of Northern India, gender ratio is atrociously skewed because of female infanticide.
Unfortunately to compensate against, the laws became extremely pro-women which were abused in many cases. Compounded on it the fact that majority marriages in India are arranged by caste, financial status of the families.
This is what my girlfriend is going through right now in England 12 months after divorcing her Indian husband. Even though we reset the iphone and change icloud he somehow manages to phone spy again within a month. Giveaways include sending messages a few minutes after he hears or reads something offensive, one time two of his friends tracked and followed us to a cinema.
The Indian ISPs such as Reliance JIO have been caught doing deep packet inspection and MITM on internet traffic with absolute impunity - impersonating even Google servers to get user data:
As AADHAR is linked to all sorts of services which users can access, it reveals a whole lot about users - including details such as their bank account numbers and in some cases even transactions.
Some of the people who are managing these things are totally incompetent and refuse to face facts. They have given stupid challenges to hackers and have had to face embarrassing exposes but they still refuse to acknowledge the problems:
After a TUPE transfer to an Indian company, we all started to get spam calls and texts after we provided our personal contact details to the HR department. We all sit in the same office and received the same series of calls.
Look on the bright side - if you get unsuccesfully poisoned with a secret nerve agent by the state intelligence services, you might have a chance at finding the killers.
Outside Mumbai domestic airport (this is where domestic flight take off and land unlike international airport .. also it is same airport but different terminal .. I digress) there is a taxi stand .. you stand in the line and one by one cabs (and auto rickshaws) will come and pick you up
Before you get on one of these cabs .. there are two airport officials (or contractors) who make you write your name and phone number and destination (in the name of accountability or security)
I am 90% certain (through grapevine) that that data is sold ..
A zero-knowledge way of sharing and validating data is the direction we shd move towards. So for example, how can i convince the apartment office that i am a good renter without sharing my personal information? Technology solutions exist for this, just not used.
Because trust has a social aspect to it, along with technical. The tech may exist, but it is going to be quite hard, if not impossible, to explain to an average person how cryptographically verified evidence of the piece of information is better than the person just accessing said information.
Exactly. And also one of the main reasons why we don't see "blockchain" getting into the mainstream products. If consumers don't understand the true benefit (or even requirement) of it, it won't work. It's really tough to convince consumers to replace soul trust with cryptography.
Block chain doesn't replace trust.
If you are strong enough, i.e. control enough mining activity, you pretty much can do whatever you want.
All it does, is formalize the same solutions for trust society has evolved.
The downside is that it naturalizes the abuses and make them morally justified.
Not long ago, a woman could go to a police station, give a complaint against her husband and family, and her husband, his relatives, even those living in other cities or even states had to be put in jail. There were numerous cases where educated urban women had their in laws families, including aging grandmothers put in jail, that was widely amplified by the media. This law, numbered 498a, wreaked havoc in the nation. The law was non bailable and once applied, cannot be withdrawn, even if the complainant wants to do so.
So you had a situation where, some urban women misused this law, causing whole families to be put in jail, without even as much as a preliminary enquiry, leading to chaos and a sure shot way for the marriage to breakdown. In a country where going to jail holds a lot of social stigma, no husband would ever want to reconcile with a wife who sent him to jail.
The law was, in intent, aimed at protecting vulnerable women, and in that intent, if used correctly, acts as a powerful deterrent to domestic violence, especially in rural areas.
However, for almost a decade, it was mainly used by urban and semi urban, educated women as a revenge tactic. The results in conviction rates, less than 5% for these cases, and the rapid increase in their numbers, lead to calls for reform. About 2 years back, the Supreme Court of India gave judgements & directed police departments to stop automatic arrests in such cases and only to make arrests after detailed enquiry. It observed that the intent of law was to reconcile and rehabilitate broken marriages due to domestic violence, but has now become a tool to harass husbands.
No wonder the society and men, especially ones with assets and reputations to lose, started to resort to such measures to protect themselves from false cases.
Edit : I would also like to add that normal divorce laws are also skewed towards women. They get favorable rulings in alimony, asset distribution, etc. Many of these 498a cases ended up being petty quarrels, where the wife wants to exact revenge, this was observed by Supreme Court too. The women did get their revenge by making their husband's families churn through the Indian court systems which are notorious for being slow and draining people financially, however, over-zealous usage and application of the law lead to dilution of a powerful law against those who actually suffer from domestic violence.