Violence Against Women Will Never End

Government, Religion, and Patriarchy are a Tough Combination

International agencies, states, and counties have all published policies and best practices as they draw attention to an issue women have been clamoring about – violence. All this attention to violence against women over the past decades has barely dented the problem. Women, as a class, an identity group, are losing their human rights, where they ever had them, as countries turn more conservative and authoritarian. The rights men, as a class, give to themselves, to determine their own lives and to embody agency, are rights women, as a class, do not have. Solving such problems is complex; one needs the other class to change. But when you add the systemic cause of the right of men to prevail over all others, patriarchy, progress is glacial.  Couple patriarchy with its natural cousin, authoritarianism, and throw in religion, which was developed and controlled by men, and progress can even be reversed. American women are seeing this with their own eyes in 2024 and many are watching the creep of authoritarianism in policies that affect them. Violence is on the upswing, men fear losing their entitlements, and women can shout from the rooftops and nothing happens.  No wonder women, as a class, are resentful.

Together these social systems deny liberties for women to act on their own accord, be full participants in civic life of their own country, and improve conditions for the next generation that they give birth to.  Women are infantilized, disregarded, and exploited for what their bodies can do for men in every corner of the world.    

Indeed, there are countries and social groups where violence against women is eschewed (not impeded).  There are religions that venerate women. There are scriptural references against violence. There are female deities. There are matrilineal traditions. But the goals of these are to venerate women in their roles as mothers, self-sacrificing beings who are raised to be carers, for that is how they must earn the dignity that men are born inhabiting. There are women leaders throughout history, but they are very few and were supported by men who could influence them in all the areas in which they were assumed to be weak, constant war being one of them.  Women have gained power through marriage and wealth, and have joined men in the subordination of ordinary women to maintain their own superior positions. Women have called for violence and perpetrated violence on their enemies and perpetrators. But calling on these few instances does not diminish the vast number of instances of men who use violence to remind women that they are second class people.  There is just too much harm done to women compared to men in interpersonal relationships, and by omission, the state, which does not curtail it.

Three main systems have been built over millennia that make life harmful to women, which can be thought of as the first order of intersectionality: authoritarian or autocratic governments, the social system of patriarchy, and the rule of religion. These were institutionalized when humans settled together for social needs and survival, built to position men above women. Every culture that has survived to this point is patriarchal. Almost all of them practically seethe with sought after opportunities for violence.

            Authoritarian governments are known for marginalizing women, pushing them under the thumb of patriarchy, and democratic governments are only marginally better, bestowing some voice and some resources to improve conditions for women. The Christian Nationalist movement in the US is attempting to replace out government with an autocracy. Countries in political flux are less likely to spend resources to ensure women’s human rights, and many around the world are more than a little unstable.  Societies that allow the oppression of women suffer the greatest risks to national security. When a country treats half its population with distain, its ability to stave off threats to security within and without is damaged along with its treatment of women and girls. 

The influence of religion on the treatment of women cannot be overstated. Religion solidified and continues to solidify the rights of men to be the center and focus of society, relegating women to the margins. Religion allows men to decide that women are unclean, unworthy, and subordinate to them, giving scriptural references to justify their actions. Scriptures were written by men, collated by men, and read aloud by men as they organized the social lives of their communities. Their gods are male, and where female gods existed, they were easily vanquished by male gods. The right for men to dominate has been vindicated through millennia. All they have to do is consult their religious texts for justification. This is true throughout the world and in all the major religions that have shaped social organization today.

            Patriarchy is a way of organizing people under the rule of men. It is a system of social organization that most of us do not notice because it is all we know. It requires conformity to gender roles that keep women in the private spaces and men in public ones. Our histories are filled with examples, and our homes are not free from it anymore than our institutions are. In countries where women can avoid marriage, choose their marriage partners, and obtain divorces, patriarchal laws provide fewer resources for women who do not conform than for those who do. Women with children are more likely to be poor and therefore more subjected to institutional discrimination. Patriarchy is why so many men are lawmakers, run governments, rule religions, amass wealth.  They are championed by other men, hired by them, and challenged to show they are more confident than they are competent. Men have the right, even the call, to engage in dominance contests to win roles and positions, wealth and property, and access to willing women, the “spoils” of demonstrated masculinity.

Violence is a part of social life. Conflicts arise over everything, but mostly over who is right. Violence enables the parties to harm each other until one party stands over the other as the winner. Men, and particularly boys, often encourage each other to fight in physical contests of strength and bravery, signs of masculinity. Demonstrating power and might has been the right of passage for men and boys since time remembered. Showing contempt for women and all things feminine increases one’s status among men. They can bond over their rights to use women as they wish, as a means to an end: their comfort, pleasure, dominance, and stature among other men. When they turn their violence on women they know and women they don’t know, they continue proving their masculinity.  Men are the audience for other men in the contests of life. 

Men rape. They assault women to express their rights as the dominating sex. They humiliate women. They dismiss women. They use women. They command women. They are terrified of being thought of like a woman. The more tenuous their position among other men, and the more violence they’ve experienced in their own youth, the more likely they are to commit violence against weaker people. The more righteous men think they are by virtue of their maleness, the more they engage in contests of dominance.  They harm because they can.

In full and hybrid democracies, there is a presumption that women are nearing an equal footing with men in many arenas. But the fact that laws must be made to protect women from violence demonstrates that being more equal is more dangerous than being less.  Men grow up learning that they should “protect” the weaker sex and children, thus instilling in them the belief that they are superior and mighty. Putting women in the same class as children infantilizes the women, says they aren’t able to help themselves. Children need protecting, but the only thing a woman needs protection from is men. The protection of women from men should not be necessary, but it is. Because even men know that being a woman is dangerous.

The more women clamor for their right to experience life with dignity, the more violence occurs against them. Men, as a class, are more violent than women, and we tacitly agree that is normal, part of the essence of men. Men commit far above their share of violent crimes, one of which is abusing or assaulting women.  Women can be violent, too.  But they are not so as a class of people.  

So many women live lives their foremothers lived with the sole purpose of tending to the needs and comforts of all others. They have no other role, no other reason for existing except to birth the next generation, hopefully sons, for the men in their orbits. The past is the present for those in religiously authoritarian societies. As women grow up, their lives are written for them, and they are too often subjected to violence if they veer from their destiny. In countries with more democratic ideals, there are many pockets of societies, usually highly religious and/or traditional ones, that control women’s destinies, in which their expectations for girls and women are to serve others.  This kind of control and lack of agency breeds resentment against men in women. Collective resentment can be motivating.