India, Sept. 19 -- The first time he hit her, they had been married for less than a week. After that the beatings became routine. Sometimes there was too much salt in the food, sometimes too little. Anything could set him off.

K told me they had never even spoken when she married him at 18. But she felt she had no choice but to marry - she needed to lighten the load on her mother, a single woman, trying to make ends meet as a domestic worker. After marriage, K moved into a two-room dwelling she shared with her husband's parents, his unmarried younger brother and a sister at Delhi's Badarpur border. It was far from where her mother and younger sister lived. When she spoke to them on the phone, somebody from her husband's family would alwa...