I imagine this story in the New York times, about the challenges poor (and lower caste) women in India face in breaking social restrictions and taboos, is getting a lot of play. I read it carefully, and had a few thoughts. First, it reminded me of articles (like this one) I've assigned to students, about the difference between legal rights and rights that can be achieved in a real social environment. Its one thing to pass laws that guarantee people their rights; its even something to enforce those laws through legal mechanisms. But until social norms change, and societies alter the way they see women and other groups, these laws will never be fully implemented to change people's lives. The "discourse of rights" has, for too long, been focused on legal change, and many of the top organizations fighting for rights are probably way to focused on legal change rather than social change. This doesn't mean that laws aren't important, but they're also, often, not enough.
On second thought, though, I saw another thing here. There is a place where some legal change would help women and lower-caste people like those in the story, but that's more about "access to justice" programs than it is about the law itself. The story tellingly discusses how women were, or were not, able to find lawyers and police willing and able to back up their claims. Laws can be powerful, but they aren't enough without the infrastructure to make them accessible, and unless people have enough education to understand what their options are. Its important in economic development programs to make these options available. And as a previous post posted out, studies by international organizations involved in this work have revealed a dismal record in actually making these changes operational. There just isn't the capacity to fight the entrenched legal system that has no interest in protecting people's rights. So, the answer seems to be that one has to work from both ends towards the middle, changing both the law and the social environment around it. This may seem obvious, but far too many development programs fail to see this; they work on one side or the other only. Its time for a more holistic view of what it means to "implement" rights, and see how these rights feed into the larger goals of development.
