“Part of the reason many believe the cultures of the Third World or immigrant communities are so much more sexist than Western ones is that incidents of sexual violence in the West are frequently thought to reflect the behavior of a few deviants — rather than as part of our culture. In contrast, incidents of violence in the Third World or immigrant communities are thought to characterize the cultures of entire nations.Culture is invoked to explain forms of violence against Third World or immigrant women while culture is not similarly invoked to explain forms of violence that affect mainstream Western women. The specific case of dowry and domestic violence murders provides an example of this phenomenon. Dowry murders take place when a new wife is murdered, usually burned to death, in connection to escalating dowry demands. Dowry murders are thought of as a peculiar indicator of the extreme misogyny of India and are frequently confused with sati — the widow immolation supposedly justified by Hindu scripture that rarely takes place in contemporary India. Recently an article in The New Yorker about arranged marriages in South Asian communities contained the suggestion that dowry murders are the cultural alternative to Western divorce — a way to exit relationships. Instead, as some have pointed out, the more appropriate analogy is to equate dowry murders with domestic violence, and specifically, domestic violence murders in the United States. The philosopher Uma Narayan has calculated that death by domestic violence in the United States is numerically as significant a social problem as dowry murders in India. But only one is used as a signifier of cultural backwardness: “They burn their women there.” As opposed to: “We shoot our women here.”