What Is Gender Violence?

Gender violence occurs within every country, continent, and cultural context, affecting women, girls, and LGBTQIA+ people of all racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, socioeconomic, ability, and age groups, including all sexualities. Gender violence is one of the most pervasive human rights violations in the world.

Many scholars, activists, and organizations, including the United Nations (UN) and the World Health Organization (WHO), use the terms “gendered violence,” “gender-based violence,” “violence against women,” and “sexual and gender-based violence,” to describe forms of violence against women and other minoritized groups, such as nonbinary, transgender, and Two-Spirit people. These terms are frequently used interchangeably; however, some scholars and activists believe that “violence against women” is an important term because the majority of victims of intimate partner violence, domestic violence, and sexual violence are women and girls. While gender violence may target people of all genders, worldwide these forms of violence are most likely to target women and girls, including trans women, as well as individuals who may challenge or transgress local gender norms within their societies. The 1993 United Nations’ Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (DEVAW), defined violence against women as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion, or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life” (General Assembly resolution 48/104).

The editors of this textbook have chosen to use the term gender violence as an umbrella term for all the forms of violence that target individuals and communities based on gender. Gender violence includes domestic violence, sometimes referred to as domestic abuse, family violence, or intimate partner violence, which can include physical, sexual, emotional, psychological, and/or economic forms of abuse within an intimate partner relationship, and is defined as a pattern of behavior in a relationship that is used to gain or maintain power and control over a partner. Domestic violence can occur within a range of relationships, including married couples, family members, people who are dating, heterosexual, and same-sex relationships.

Gender violence includes sexual violence, defined as sexual activity in which consent is not obtained or freely given, and which includes sexual assault, rape, and sexual abuse. Sexual harassment is a form of sexual violence in which one receives unwanted and unwelcome verbal, nonverbal, or physical sexual conduct, and can occur in the workplace, school settings, homes, and public places.

Gender violence also includes forced prostitution, trafficking, stalking (including cyberstalking), “honor” killings, and state violence and hate crimes directed at particular groups of women or gender minorities, including Black, Indigenous, and other women of color, women of particular ethnic, religious, or cultural groups, disabled women and girls, women in the sex industry, and queer, trans, and gender nonconforming people. Women and girls most vulnerable to violence include members of ethnic minority groups; Indigenous, displaced, and refugee women and girls; migrant women, including migrant women workers; women in detention; women and girls with disabilities; women and girls in the sex industry; those living in poverty and/or on the street; and those in situations of armed conflict. Gender violence includes violence perpetrated by governments (also called “states,” or nations, in this context), including violence associated with reproductive health, detention, and the criminal justice system. Gender violence (by military combatants and by civilians) takes place in contexts of armed conflict and war, where rape has been documented as a tool of war, and femicide—the systematic killing of women and girls—as a form of genocide.

The 1993 passage of DEVAW by the United Nations General Assembly is significant as it represents an explicit international recognition of gender violence as a human rights issue requiring state intervention, rather than a private issue to be resolved within families. The first special rapporteur on violence against women, Radhika Coomaraswamy, was appointed in 1994, and conducted a detailed investigation about the causes and consequences of gender violence at national, regional, and international levels. In her report, Coomaraswamy focused on three key areas where gender violence occurs—families, communities, and states. Within families, practices including domestic violence, sexual abuse, marital rape, infanticide, and dowry-related violence make women and girls particularly vulnerable. Within the general community, women, girls, and LGBTQIA+ individuals experience sexual harassment, sexual assault, labor exploitation, and trafficking. And state violence includes forms of violence perpetrated or condoned by governments or their institutions, such as criminal justice systems, immigration enforcement, and the medical-industrial complex (Coomaraswamy, 1996).

The costs and consequences of gender violence are profound, and include economic and social costs stemming from isolation and the inability to work, participate in regular activities, or care for children (WHO, 2021); as well as stigma and rejection from partners, families, and communities (WHO, 2005, 2021). Gender violence is a major cause of death and disability, and forms of violence may lead to a range of health problems, including physical issues and disorders, reproductive health problems (including HIV infection, unintended pregnancy, injury, and trauma to the reproductive tract), as well as emotional distress, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), substance abuse, and suicide. “Violence or the threat of violence creates barriers to women’s and girls’ full participation in society, and represents a serious obstacle to women’s empowerment, gender equality, reproductive justice, and human rights” (Duncan, 2022).

What does it mean to resist gender violence? And what are the barriers to doing so? In this volume, authors from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, institutional contexts, and social locations consider these questions, offering various strategies to help us develop a collective analysis. This introduction explains several key terms, and presents an intersectional and transnational feminist conceptual framework for us to understand gender violence. As the editors explain in their preface, the chapters in this textbook focus on victims and survivors of gender violence, prioritizing their voices in naming problems and proposing solutions.

Resisting gender violence is challenging because it is so commonplace in our society. Many forms of gender violence are accepted and viewed as normal, natural, harmless, or even deserved, particularly when the targets of such violence are members of vulnerable or marginalized communities. According to the World Health Organization, at least one in three women worldwide is subjected to gender violence at some point in their lifetime (WHO, 2021). Survivors of gender violence are stigmatized in many societies; they may feel shame or humiliation, or they may be reluctant to report the violence for fear of not being believed or due to risks of additional violence, including violence perpetrated by law enforcement officials. In cases of intimate partner violence and domestic violence, many people view gender violence as a private matter to be resolved within the family. In actuality, gender violence is a structural problem, perpetuated and/or sustained by social institutions worldwide.

After reading this introduction you will have a better understanding of what gender violence is, and how to understand gender violence through intersectional and transnational feminist lenses. Chapters in this textbook will cover a variety of themes related to gender violence, including climate change, labor, health, sports, and media.

An Intersectional Feminist Analysis of Gender Violence

The writings in this textbook rely on an intersectional feminist approach. Intersectionality is an influential concept grounded in Black feminist thought, theorized by Black feminist scholars and writers including Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Beal, the Combahee River Collective, Patricia Hill Collins, and others. Today, many attribute intersectionality to Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term in two foundational articles, “Demarginalizing the Intersections of Race and Sex” (1989) and “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color” (1991). Intersectionality highlights the ways that structures of power intersect (overlap or interact) with one another. As Patricia Hill Collins explains, “intersectional paradigms remind us that oppression cannot be reduced to one fundamental type, and that oppressions work together in producing injustice” (2000, p. 21). Thus, an intersectional feminist analysis helps us understand how race, gender, class, sexuality, nation, caste, age, disability, and other systems of domination intersect, creating multiple forms of violence that target specific communities and individuals. Crenshaw uses the term to underscore the ways Black women and other women of color experience both sexism and racism, frequently leading to being targeted for specific forms of violence.

As an analytical tool, intersectionality allows us to understand how a person’s experiences of gender violence are shaped by other categories of their identities and other systems of oppression. It lets us make connections among multiple forms of gender violence, from police brutality to medical and reproductive forms of gender violence. Intersectionality, as Jennifer C. Nash writes, is an “analytic that asks how we might reconceptualize discrimination, harm, violence, and power around the experiences of the multiply rather than the singly marginalized” (2021, p. 129). And as Vivian M. May suggests, intersectionality “approaches lived identities as interlaced and systems of oppression as enmeshed and mutually reinforcing” and focuses on their “interstices, from the nodal points where they hinge or touch” (2015, p. 3).

Tragically, a recent incident helps us understand why we need an intersectional feminist analysis of gender violence. Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman and emergency medical technician, was killed in her Kentucky home in the United States in March 2020 by the police, who forced entry into her home in the middle of the night because they were looking for her ex-boyfriend. The police shot Taylor multiple times and left her without medical care for more than 20 minutes. No one was charged for Taylor’s death (one former police officer was recently found guilty of one count of civil rights abuse) (US Department of Justice, 2024). Breonna Taylor’s death highlights systemic racism and racialized gender violence in the context of a long history of police brutality and violence against Black communities.

Countless Black women have been killed by police or died in police custody, including Sandra Bland, Tanisha Anderson, and too many others; but as Crenshaw notes, the recurring police violence against Black women rarely gets the attention it deserves. In response, she created the hashtag #SayHerName as a form of public activism and collective social media response, asking us all to remember the lives of Black women and girls who have been killed by the police (Crenshaw et al., 2015). An intersectional feminist analysis of Taylor’s murder shows it as a form of gendered racism and racialized gender violence.

Intersectional feminism reminds us that gender violence does not occur only because of gender discrimination. State violence, which includes physical, sexual, and psychological violence perpetrated or condoned by the state, may take multiple forms; and as noted earlier, targets the most vulnerable populations. It may include violence perpetrated by police and the criminal justice system, including immigration officials, violence against women and girls in detention, and violence associated with medical care and reproductive health.

Because victims of gender violence frequently experience multiple forms of violence—associated with poverty, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, colonization, and militarization, among other systems—it is critical to approach gender violence through an intersectional feminist framework. For example, Indigenous women are often subjected to violence, including sexual violence, used as a tool of conquest and genocide. The numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people in the settler colonial context of North America have reached epidemic proportions. This violence represents a form of colonial violence, linked to historical trauma for Indigenous communities. Similar rates of violence are also reported among other Indigenous communities, including Australia and New Zealand. In situations of armed conflict, the political motives underlying war are also often used to justify sexual violence against women and girls; as we have seen in Rwanda, Vietnam, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Korea, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, and Ukraine. While the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women asserts that states should condemn violence against women, such violence nonetheless continues.

A Transnational Feminist Framework for Understanding Gender Violence

This textbook also emphasizes a transnational feminist framework for understanding gender violence. Unlike “global feminism,” which implies a “universal sisterhood,” and “international feminism,” which regards national borders as concrete realities, transnational feminist approaches “emphasize the political function of borders while they expose their constructedness and porousness” (Savci, 2021, p. 241). Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan’s influential book, Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (1994) offered an important critique of the presumed universality of womanhood within dominant western feminist constructions, which failed to account for the differing experiences of women in various contexts around the world. Other feminist scholars, including Chandra Talpade Mohanty, M. Jacqui Alexander, and Uma Narayan, built on and extended this treatment to theorize transnational feminisms in relation to global capitalism, neoliberalism, reproductive labor, tourism, care work, the global sex industry, and militarism and war.

Ashwini Tambe and Millie Thayer write: “Transnational feminism is at once a perspective, a set of theories, and a set of activist practices, networks, and discourses” (2021, p. 15). As they explain, transnational feminism is aligned with intersectional feminism, as it examines the ways systems of oppression interact with one another. In addition, originating as a critique of imperial feminism, transnational feminism focuses on “the relationship among colonialism, racial formations, and gender/sexual regimes” (Tambe & Thayer 2021, p. 17). Hence, a transnational feminist approach to gender violence also considers the dynamics and politics of settler colonialism, migration, globalization, neoliberalism, capitalism, and political economy.

A transnational feminist theoretical framework recognizes more fluid boundaries and borders between nation-states and global processes that may be multi-directional. It also questions the binary concept of Global North and South (or “First World/Third World”). And it emphasizes the interconnectedness of our experiences, histories, and struggles across national borders, enabling us greater forms of solidarity.

In considering gender violence through a transnational feminist framework, we must be critical of the ways western paradigms have shaped discourse on violence against women worldwide. In particular, dominant narratives of gender violence in the Global South often rely on harmful stereotypes about local women and communities. Cultural relativism—or the idea that individuals should be understood in the context of their society—is often used to reinforce the assumption that violence against women in some contexts can be explained by their “culture.” Scholars like Uma Narayan have asked why this is so often the rationale for gender violence in Global South contexts as well as within marginalized communities in the North, but not in mainstream white, middle class, heteronormative communities (Narayan, 1997).

Rather than perceive gender violence as “traditional” or “cultural,” a transnational feminist framework encourages us to ask questions about how gender violence may occur in relation to shifting cultural, socioeconomic, and political processes. Similarly, Chandra Talpade Mohanty criticizes the idea of a formulaic “Third World woman” within a universal patriarchal framework, arguing that such concepts result in women in the Global South being stereotyped, frozen in time, decontextualized; and seen as always already victimized by male violence, family, religion, and culture (Mohanty, 2003). As she and others point out, this dynamic also frequently reduces Black, Indigenous, and other women of color to similar stereotypes.

A transnational feminist analysis enables us to explore social, historical, and political explanations for gender violence, as well as the complex contexts and experiences that shape individuals’ lives across multiple differences. In addition, it helps us to recognize the ways people respond to oppression and resistance in distinct ways in different contexts.

Resisting Gender Violence

When U.S.-based activist Tarana Burke first started using the phrase “Me Too” on social media in 2006, she was naming her experience as a survivor of sexual harassment and expressing solidarity with others who had had similar experiences. The phrase became part of a broader movement to end sexual abuse and violence when celebrities like Alyssa Milano began using #MeToo in 2017 as a hashtag after the sexual abuse allegations surrounding Harvey Weinstein (Lakkimsetti & Reddy, 2021). Soon, people around the world were speaking out against gender violence and expressing solidarity with other survivors by sharing the hashtag in more than 85 countries, including Iran, South Korea, Egypt, China, Afghanistan, India, Palestine, France, Turkey, and Nigeria.

While resisting gender violence is critical, we must also be wary of punitive responses to gender violence, which rely on policing, criminalization, prosecution, and incarceration. Such approaches conflict with broader movements for gender, racial, and economic justice. Carceral (penal) feminist strategies for addressing gender violence, which frequently emphasize individual cases rather than the structural forms of violence, have failed (Britton, 2020). Similarly, state responses to gender violence have been problematic because states are complicit in the oppression of marginalized communities and often condone and legitimize gender violence through the criminal justice system, police violence, violence against women in detention and at national borders by immigration officials, sexual violence in prisons, and gender violence by military personnel during armed conflict. In contrast, abolition feminism, rooted in women of color feminisms and other radical anti-violence movements, is a politically informed theoretical framework and movement that is critical of the criminal legal system. Abolition feminism rejects carceral solutions associated with increased policing, surveillance, and the prison industrial complex, and instead seeks transformative and restorative justice through greater accountability, mutual support, and more resources for survivors of violence.

It is clear that gender violence results from and reinforces gender oppression, affecting women, girls, and LGBTQIA+ people within families, communities, workplaces, and society in general. Gender violence constitutes a public health issue, a human rights violation, and an obstacle to peace and development. Resisting gender violence requires a multi-pronged approach to address multiple levels of violence, including individual experiences of victimization as well as long-term structural forms of violence. As Davis et al. remind us, the movement to end gender and sexual violence “can never be isolated from the work to end state violence, including the violence of policing” (2022, p. 2). As they write, “organizing to end gender violence must include work against the prison industrial complex—against border patrols, against the incarceration of disability, against the criminalization of radical democratic protest—and as centrally, for mutual aid, cop-free schools, reproductive justice, and dignity for trans lives” (p. 4).

Resisting gender violence requires education, resources and support for survivors, accountability for perpetrators, political movement, and a change in how laws are understood and applied. In addition, this work must recognize the specific local histories and contexts of gender violence in order to develop strategies for intervention that will be effective within such contexts. And we must follow the lead of those most impacted: survivors of gender violence.

References

Britton, H. E. Ending gender-based violence: Justice and community in South Africa. Urbana: The University of Chicago Press, 2020.

Collins, P. H. Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2000, 2009.

Davis, A. Y., Dent, G., Meiners, E. R., & Richie, B. E. Abolition, feminism. Now. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022.

Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, Resolution 48/100 (1993).

Duncan, P. (2022, June 1). Gender-based violence worldwide. In Women Worldwide: Transnational Feminist Perspectives, 2nd Edition, Ed. Tracy Butts, Patti Duncan, Janet Lockhart, and Susan Shaw. Oregon State University Open Educational Resources. https://open.oregonstate.education/womenworldwide/#main

Grewal, I., & Kaplan, C. (Eds.). (1994). Scattered hegemonies: Postmodernity and transnational feminist practices. U of Minnesota Press.

Lakkimsetti, C. and Reddy, V. “#MeToo and transnational gender justice: An introduction.” Feminist Formations, Vol. 33, Issue 3, Winter 2021.

May, V. M. Pursuing intersectionality, unsettling dominant imaginaries. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Nash, J. C. Intersectionality. In Keywords for Gender and Sexuality, edited by The Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective. New York: New York University Press, 2021, 128-133.

Palestinian Feminist Collective. (2023). The Palestinian Feminist Collective Condemns Reproductive Genocide in Gaza. The Palestinian Feminist Collective Condemns Reproductive Genocide in Gaza – Palestinian Feminist Collective

Savci, E. Transnational. In Keywords for Gender and Sexuality, edited by The Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective. New York: New York University Press, 2021, 241-245.

United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. (2024, November 8). There must be “due reckoning” for horrific violations, possible atrocity crimes in Gaza – UN Human Rights Chief. Press Release. There must be “due reckoning” for horrific violations, possible atrocity crimes in Gaza – UN Human Rights Chief | OHCHR.

United States Department of Justice. (2024, November 1). Former Louisville, Kentucky, metro police officer found guilty of federal civil rights crimes related to the Breonna Taylor case. US Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs. Office of Public Affairs | Former Louisville, Kentucky, Metro Police Officer Found Guilty of Federal Civil Rights Crimes Related to the Breonna Taylor Case | United States Department of Justice

Further Learning

Abu-Lughod, L., Hammami, R., & Shalhoub-Kevorkian, N. (Eds.). (2023). The cunning of gender violence: Geopolitics and feminism. Duke University Press.

Britton, H. E. Ending gender-based violence: Justice and community in South Africa. Urbana: The University of Chicago Press, 2020.

Crenshaw, K. “The Urgency of Intersectionality.” (Ted Talk). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akOe5-UsQ2o

Deer, S. The Beginning and end of rape: Confronting sexual violence in Native America. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Dick, K. Dir. (2015). The Hunting Ground (Documentary Film). https://www.thehuntinggroundfilm.com/story.html

Jaleel, R. M. The work of rape. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.

Petillo, A. D. J. & H. R. Hlavka, (Eds.) (2022).  Researching gender-based violence: Embodied and intersectional approaches. New York University Press.