This volume while appreciating some of the advances Kerala has made, critiques from a feminist perspective, Kerala s development experience. It brings together papers written by women who have gained enormous practical experience regarding atrocities against women by engaging with them in various capacities, as activists or professionals or from their subjective experience and have the advantage of access to information that are not open to outsiders . // How social institutions the family, the police, the judiciary, the court system, the family court, the women s commission, the political parties, the panchayat all institutions that have the potential of being supportive to women are in fact, unsupportive, ineffective and even hostile to women victims of violence are highlighted through the various papers that reveal the subjective and micro-level realities of women s experiences of a social system that is deemed woman-friendly. The way forward as it emerges from Kerala s local-level realities also forms the subject of discussion in the volume.