Institutionalized Violence Against Women in India: A Deep Dive

Violence against women in India is not simply a law-and-order problem. It is a structural one. Across Indian society, caste hierarchies, religious doctrines, and cultural traditions do not merely coexist with gender-based violence – they actively produce, justify, and sustain it. When violence becomes so deeply embedded in social institutions that it is perceived as natural, inevitable, or even necessary, it has been institutionalized. This post examines how that institutionalization works: how everyday violence is obscured, how extreme violence is normalized, and how specific cultural practices function as mechanisms of control over women’s bodies and lives.

How society normalizes violence against women 🔗

Institutionalized violence does not always look like violence. Often, it looks like tradition, religion, or the simple preservation of social order. In India, caste, religion, and culture do not operate in isolation – they reinforce each other to construct a patriarchal framework that justifies control over women and punishes any deviation from it.

Research in postcolonial feminist theory describes this as a process of “naturalizing hierarchy” – where the structural violence embedded in caste and gender order is made to appear not just acceptable, but morally necessary. The ideological apparatus operates by naturalizing hierarchy, aestheticizing conformity, and transforming exclusion into moral obligation. Its true danger lies in the seamless blending of structural violence with cultural legitimacy, making domination appear not only justifiable but necessary.

This is precisely how violence becomes institutionalized. It ceases to be recognized as violence at all. A wife being beaten for “not obeying” is framed as a domestic matter. A Dalit woman being sexually assaulted by an upper-caste man is treated as a caste-order enforcement, not a crime. Norms and attitudes that support male dominance in the family normalize domestic violence as a family matter , and police often reflect these same attitudes when survivors seek help.

The role of caste in manufacturing consent for violence 🔗

The caste system is a foundational technology for institutionalizing violence. It assigns bodies their social value – or lack thereof – from birth. Although India’s caste system was officially outlawed in 1950, caste-based discrimination is still very much in practice. It positions Dalit women at the bottom of the social hierarchy and normalizes rape and sexual violence by upper-caste men.

The logic is explicit and brutal: Upper-caste female bodies have historically been constructed as desirable, racially pure, and protected, so as to maintain caste-purity. On the other hand, lower-caste and Dalit women’s bodies are constructed as readily available and without any subjectivity. Religious customs and social norms have allowed upper-caste men to have easy access to Dalit women’s bodies. This is not incidental to the caste system – it is central to its reproduction.

In rural areas, there is an assumption that Dalit women are available for any kind of exploitation and violence because of their “low” and “impure” status due to their caste. It is assumed that these women do not deserve honor and dignity. This becomes the main factor for sexual violence against Dalit women. The caste-class-gender axis, as researchers describe it, forms the systematic foundation for this violence.

Religion as an instrument of patriarchal control 🔗

Religious institutions have historically codified male authority and female subordination, giving violence against women a sacred veneer. The language, symbols, and culturally conditioned interpretation of religious scriptures have evolved a practice that alienates women and even influences exploitation and violence towards them.

Manusmriti, the divine code of conduct for Hindus, depicts women in a very poor light and is full of derogatory statements about them. It advocates total control of women by the men in their lives. It also divided Indian society into castes, granting privilege to the higher castes and penalties to the lower ones. When these religious prescriptions fuse with caste hierarchies, the result is a doubly reinforced structure of control – one in which violence against women appears spiritually ordained and socially expected.

Feminist theologians have identified this as a politics of representation, where in all mainstream religions and cultures, humans are cast in a gendered mold. The definition of masculinity places men at an advantage while women, defined as weak, sensitive, and dependent, are highly disadvantaged. These definitions are not neutral: they produce material conditions in which women’s harm is minimized, dismissed, or sanctioned.

Spectacular vs. everyday violence 🔗

A critical insight from feminist scholarship on gender-based violence is the distinction between spectacular violence – dramatic, visible, publicly reported – and everyday violence – covert, routine, structurally embedded, and largely invisible. Both are harmful, but everyday violence is far more pervasive and far more difficult to challenge precisely because it is not recognized as violence at all.

What spectacular violence looks like 🔗

Spectacular violence captures public attention. The 2012 Delhi gang rape became a national flashpoint. The 2020 Hathras case sent shockwaves across India. Because of its extreme violence, the Hathras rape sent shock waves throughout India: it is a disturbing reminder of the normalization of rape culture there and should be seen as a call to action.

These incidents trigger protests, parliamentary debates, and legal reforms. But their visibility also creates a dangerous illusion – the idea that violence against women is an aberration, a failure of individual men, rather than a product of systemic structures. Focusing only on the spectacular cases allows the everyday machinery of violence to continue unexamined.

Communal riots represent another form of spectacular, institutionalized violence. Since 1947, sexual violence against minority and lower-caste women has increasingly been used to consolidate cross-caste Hindu alliances. In the pogrom led by the ruling Hindutva right in Gujarat in 2002, large numbers of Muslim women were gang-raped, as were many hundreds in the Mumbai pogroms fomented by the nativist Shiv Sena in 1992-93. In neither case has a single perpetrator been charged with sexual crimes. As scholar Paul Brass has argued, this violence is not spontaneous – it is a routinized repertoire of politics, prepared and perpetrated by organized actors constituting an “institutionalized riot machine.”

The more dangerous face of everyday violence 🔗

Everyday violence is the violence that does not make headlines. It is the chronic domestic abuse framed as a “private family matter.” It is the dowry harassment that escalates slowly and invisibly. It is the psychological coercion, the economic control, the forced sexual compliance within marriage. It is the Dalit woman forced into manual scavenging. It is the daughter whose birth is treated as a burden.

Official figures from India’s National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) show that 445,256 incidents of crimes against women were reported nationally in 2022, an alarming increase from the previous year. The most frequently documented offense was cruelty by husbands or relatives, accounting for over 140,000 cases. And these are only the reported cases. NCRB data indicate that women in India are victims of a crime every 3 minutes , yet the vast majority of domestic violence goes unreported due to stigma, economic dependence, and fear.

Some women did not seek help for abuse or try to help other women facing abuse because of their justification of wife-beating. Being raised in a society with strict gender norms, abuse was normalized in their families. This is the most insidious feature of institutionalized violence: the victims themselves often internalize the ideological framework that enables their harm.

Activists echo the notion that women are hit the hardest in everyday life and during caste clashes. Sexual violence is linked to debt bondage in rural areas. Women’s crime-specific violations – naked parading, gang rape, forced consumption of human waste – are documented as regular instruments of caste punishment, not exceptional crimes. Gang rapes are mostly of Dalit women. These cases should be given top priority, requiring immediate action and immediate punishment , as activists have long demanded.

The legal system itself reinforces this invisibility. The conviction rate for rapes in India against Dalit women is only 2%, as opposed to the national average of 25%. That number makes the state’s complicity undeniable.

Cultural practices that institutionalize violence 🔗

Institutionalized violence is reproduced through specific, named cultural practices. These practices are not anomalies; they are recognized social institutions that encode women’s subordination into the everyday structure of life.

Endogamous marriage and control over women’s sexuality 🔗

Endogamy – the practice of marrying within one’s caste – is one of the most powerful mechanisms through which caste hierarchy is maintained, and women’s bodies are its primary site of enforcement. The caste system subordinates Dalit women’s bodies, sexuality, and reproductive choices by forcing them to practice endogamy through enforced widowhood and child marriage. Those women who dare to challenge endogamy and other harmful caste norms experience brutal retaliation in the form of sexual exploitation, abuse, and harassment.

B.R. Ambedkar challenges the caste system in his paper “Castes in India” and offers insight into the sociological relationship between Brahmanism and patriarchy, noting that the assertion of caste power deepens the caste system and encourages those from oppressor castes to control Dalit women and their sexuality. When a woman from a lower caste marries a man of a higher caste, or vice versa, it is treated as a transgression against social purity – one that can be punished with violence, social boycott, or death.

Honor killings are the most extreme expression of this logic. Honor killings occur across religion, social status, wealth, and age. They take place when families believe the honor of their family is at risk, often when a woman’s virginity is lost or when she marries a partner belonging to a lower caste. Honor crimes are likely underreported, as there are no specific laws to prosecute them. The violence here is not aberrant – it is the system working exactly as designed.

Dowry: violence embedded in a “cultural institution” 🔗

Despite being legally prohibited since 1961 under the Dowry Prohibition Act, dowry remains a pervasive and lethal practice. The contemporary dowry practice is a “cultural oxymoron that has no resemblance to the historical institution,” and a bride rarely has any control over her dowry. The practice of dowry was originally limited to the upper-caste community of northern India, but today, dowry is practiced across regions, castes, and classes.

The most frequently reported risk correlates of domestic violence at the sociocultural level were norms and attitudes that supported violence against women, male dominance, and ideals of masculinity. Cultural practice of dowry, where husband or in-laws were dissatisfied with the dowry amount, also resulted in increased domestic violence and women’s deaths.

According to NCRB data, 6,589 dowry deaths were registered in India in 2021, with the highest number from Uttar Pradesh. Bride burning – setting a woman on fire and staging it as a kitchen accident – is among the most extreme forms of dowry-related killing. The institution of dowry does not just enable this violence; it creates the economic incentive structure that makes a woman’s life literally less valuable than the cash and goods her family can provide.

Communal violence and the weaponization of women’s bodies 🔗

During communal riots, women’s bodies become a direct instrument of political and caste warfare. Muslim women in India not only face the culturally Indian patriarchy that looms over every female citizen, they also have to constantly be wary of facing communal violence. Sexual violence in this context is not an incidental byproduct of conflict – it is a deliberate strategy.

Rapes formed part of the repertoire of violence in Gujarat and Mumbai, designed to terrify and humiliate Muslims at a time when the BJP’s electoral victory was at stake. The same logic applies to Dalit women in caste conflicts, where sexual assault is used explicitly to “teach the entire Dalit community a lesson.” These caste-driven atrocities are perceived as a message to dehumanize Dalit women and reinforce the narrative that women must remain subservient to caste-assigned conduct and norms.

When the state fails to prosecute these crimes – as it routinely does – it does not simply look away. It actively reproduces the institution. The judiciary and institutional actors repeatedly fail at protecting Dalit women. In caste clashes documented by Human Rights Watch, police delayed registering complaints, courts acquitted accused men on reasoning that “respectable” men could not have committed rape, and institutional bias at every level of the legal system compounded the original harm.

Why the “institutionalized” framing matters 🔗

Calling this violence “institutionalized” is not rhetorical. It is analytical. These are not disconnected incidents but deeply interwoven mechanisms of a hegemonic order that institutionalizes caste and gender hierarchies through cultural, legal, and epistemic channels. Understanding violence as institutionalized means understanding that legislative fixes alone cannot dismantle it.

The UK Home Office’s 2025 country assessment on India notes that despite improvements in women’s education and political participation, social and cultural norms, alongside patriarchal attitudes, prescribe discriminatory and stereotypical roles, and 45% of women and 44% of men agreed with at least one justification for wife-beating. This data points to the degree to which violence has been internalized as acceptable – not despite institutions, but because of them.

To ensure that the intersectional vulnerabilities and lived experiences of Dalit survivors are addressed, the government must recognize the presence of systemic and institutional gender relations that underpin patriarchy and masculinity in Indian society. Acknowledging the struggles of Dalit women and girls helps challenge the status quo, caste boundaries and oppressions, and the societal norms and notions that promote systemic gender-based violence.

What makes institutionalized violence particularly resistant to change is precisely what makes it so effective: it operates through culture, through religion, through family, and through the state simultaneously. The result is a system that teaches women to accept violence, teaches men that they are entitled to commit it, and teaches institutions to look away when they do.

What do you think? If violence against women is embedded in institutions rather than individual behavior, what does meaningful accountability look like – and at which institution should reform begin? When cultural practices like dowry or endogamous marriage are defended as tradition, where does the line fall between preserving heritage and perpetuating harm?

References

1. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/articles/10.3389/fpos.2025.1611435/full
2. https://indiankanoon.org/doc/542601/
3. https://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/india/India994-11.htm
4. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/india-country-policy-and-information-notes/country-policy-and-information-note-women-fearing-gender-based-violence-india-august-2025-accessible