To End Gender-Based Violence, the Patriarchy Needs to be Smashed

Violence against women and girls is prevalent across the world, impacting every facet of their lives. From the report about Amber Czech’s death, to the recent worldwide data on gender-based violence (GBV), there is a big issue on our hands. I’d argue that this is an epidemic, and, like all epidemics, its “spread” is social. 

The widespread nature of GBV, across the world, shows that the issue is systemic. However, we have to make sure that we don’t mistake systems for their empirical byproducts. That is to say, a data point like the fact that 30% of girls and women experience violence from a partner (husband/spouse/lover/etc) and/or a non-partner (relatives, friends, acquaintances) at least once in their life doesn’t tell us much about how that became the case. 

Mistaking empirical information for the context in which it comes about means that there is a tendency to see the problems as issues of misogyny and sexism–framed as personal faults–rather than patriarchy, which is systemic. 

This is not to pretend that misogyny and sexism aren’t extremely impactful and detrimental to the lives of women and other marginalized gender folks (maGes). It is meant to point out that they, as personal actions or behaviors, are animated by communities, institutions, and–most of all–systems, that are built to shape (that is to say, control) how people relate to one another.

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Patriarchy is a system of control/domination, just like capitalism and colonialism.^[1]

Where capitalism is about controlling ownership of the means of production through “property” through giving primacy to capitalists, and colonialism is about controlling access to “legitimate” being/power/truth/freedom by way of dispossession, the (constant re-)invention of theft, and the Othering of non-colonialist cultures/peoples through giving primacy to whites, colonists, and settlers, patriarchy is about controlling embodiment and social reproduction, through giving primacy to cis men.

The interconnections of the three means that the capitalists and settlers/colonists that are given primacy in questions of domineering power are often cis men as well.

Patriarchy animates GBV through using misogyny and sexism as interpersonal weapons, allowing those who align with it, most obviously cis men,^[2] to police, regulate, extract from, and discard everyone else, the biggest contingent of that population being cis women. If looking at capitalism and colonialism is any indication, labeling someone as “lesser than,” whether they are a “worker,” “native,” or a “woman,” that creation of a subject and its Other leads to the justification for abuse, and even death.

Many of the current and proposed responses to GBV are ineffectual because they treat the issue like they treat every other issue people face; as overdetermined by interpersonality, rather than understanding that people interact in a context of social systems and institutions. These bodies shape people and their behaviors just as much as people shape them.

Two examples I want to highlight are American women sharing their experiences working in the trades in the wake of Amber Czech’s murder and a proposal for addressing the twin issues of violence against women and violence against children from researchers in South Africa.

For the former, a focus on advocating for federal level policy and encouraging women to work in the trades sees the issue as a perceptual one and a matter of not having the right agreements in place, rather than the domineering nature of capitalism combining with the domineering nature of patriarchy, leading to a negative space of impunity that is always reacting rather than addressing root causes.

For the latter, the ideas about integrating multiple sectors of governmental services together with an attention to early intervention and root causes sounds like a more specific and holistic solution, but fails to, in my estimation, and to the plan’s detriment, acknowledge the societal nature of slow violence that animates interpersonal violence in specific ways that interrupt that relation.

Providing for youth in a way that doesn’t point them towards patriarchal violence as a response to conflict is paramount, but I’m not sure that can happen on a societal level with piecemeal reforms to colonial and patriarchal structures like states and their bureaucratic institutions.

I don’t say any of this to needlessly critique genuine efforts to solve real problems, nor do I intend to minimize that these problems stem from issues that sit at the core of how these societies are structured. I say this to point out that a lot of times, reform efforts are not helpful in addressing root causes, because they presuppose that the system or institution or organization that is being reformed is “malfunctioning” rather than fulfilling its exclusionary and colonial design.

The answer to GBV has to be revolutionary in content and form for it to not only address particular moments of violence and prevent their occurrence, but to change the very logics and incentives that see GBV as an “answer” to “questions” of power.

“Revolution” here is a process rather than a timebound event, based around working towards the abolition of capitalism, colonialism/coloniality, and patriarchy, along with every other tendril of domination that they animate and are animated by. These fights have rarely come together in a way that acknowledges that they’re interconnected.

A way to start to address that is to (re)build and (re)start anti-capitalist/communist, anti-colonial/decolonial, and anti-patriarchal/feminist movements that see all of those things as inseparable, while building out infrastructure to treat GBV as a central thing to address in what movements do, imagine, and build.

This looks like doing the kinds of early work to discourage it (maGe empowerment in processes, systems, structures, and spaces), while moving away from the kinds of Othering logic that animate it.

Whether it's distributing social reproductive work and care work across genders, or building new relationships to “accountability” and “justice” that are decolonial and feminist, there are actions movements can take to address these issues interpersonally. They can be done in ways that can start to unravel and deconstruct the systems that breathe life into them.

Another space where issues can arise is that a lot of the conversation around violence against women tends to focus on cis women specifically, which can hide the fact that there are other marginalized genders that exist.

We can modify patriarchy to be understood as cisheteropatriarchy to help us understand other dynamics at play, namely that cishetero people in general can sideline trans issues in ways that, for cis women, prevent those of them who aren’t privileged by colonialism and capitalism (among other systems) end up hurting their efforts at liberation.

Similarly to cis women, trans people, with a numerical weight towards trans women, experience GBV and have to deal with de jure discrimination along with de facto.

Incorporating trans folks into the revolutionary work discussed means understanding the issues we face as a specific kind of feminist issue that calls the patriarchy into question in another way, upsetting its very material foundations and reliance on categorizing and gender roles.

If violence against mages isn’t addressed, communities will be stuck with the issues that people seem to put more care into, like war, climate, and economic wellbeing (even though maGes are the people most negatively impacted by those things). Remember, all of these issues are interconnected.

That doesn’t mean that they can’t have impacts that appear autonomously, nor does it mean that they can be flattened into a single thing and responded to with a unitary program for action. It is simply to affirm that domination in its many forms needs to be responded to in ways that are general and specific, from the interpersonal to the societal scale.