How Cultural Norms Create Impunity for Violence Against Women

Violence against women is described by researchers as “the most pervasive and yet least recognized human rights violation in the world.” That dual quality – pervasive yet unrecognized – is not accidental. It is the product of culture. Across societies, cultural norms do not simply fail to prevent violence against women; in many cases, they actively justify it, conceal it, and punish those who dare name it. This happens through three intertwined mechanisms: granting perpetrators impunity by framing violence as a private or natural matter, failing to recognize the suffering of marginalized women as valid, and sorting women into “good” and “bad” categories to determine whose pain deserves a response. Understanding these mechanisms is essential to understanding why so much gender-based violence goes unaddressed – not despite culture, but because of it.

The cultural justification of violence 🔗

Impunity – the freedom of perpetrators to act without legal or social consequence – is rarely created by law alone. It is sustained by culture. When a society broadly accepts that a husband has authority over his wife’s body, or that male aggression within marriage is natural, the law often reflects that acceptance. The result is a system where violence is not just tolerated but normalized.

Marital rape is one of the clearest examples. In almost one-third of the world’s nations, marital rape remains outside the scope of criminal law. This legal silence is not an oversight – it reflects a deeply held cultural belief that marriage constitutes ongoing sexual consent. The doctrine has historical roots: 17th-century British jurist Matthew Hale argued that a husband could not be guilty of raping his wife because she had given herself to him upon marriage. His reasoning has invisibly supported rape myths that persist in legal systems and social attitudes to this day.

Where marital rape is technically criminalized, cultural barriers often still prevent it from being prosecuted. Legal silence on marital rape creates impunity for men who sexually assault women who are their wives or intimate partners, effectively legitimizing this form of violence against women. When survivors do come forward, police and prosecutors frequently treat the matter as a domestic dispute rather than a crime. In documented cases in India, women reporting spousal rape have been told by police that a husband has the right to his wife’s body, and only charges of domestic abuse – not rape – are recorded.

This is not unique to any one country or religion. Research in Kyrgyzstan found that cultural norms, including the immense pressure on women to preserve marriages and wide acceptance of violence as natural, were among the primary reasons domestic violence was perpetuated. Service providers working with survivors noted that many women did not identify what was happening to them as violence at all – they had internalized it as a normal part of married life. Among both victims and members of the public, only extreme physical violence was recognized as domestic abuse – there was near-total lack of awareness of sexual, psychological, and economic violence.

The United Nations has directly identified the root of this problem: patriarchal values, unequal power relations, gender stereotypes, and negative social norms, perceptions, and customs justify, normalize, condone, or perpetuate violence against women and girls, and stigmatize victims and survivors. When these norms go unchallenged, they do not just enable individual perpetrators – they protect them.

When culture determines what counts as violence 🔗

Culture shapes more than attitudes; it shapes definitions. Various cultures recognize certain forms of sexual violence as condemned and other forms as tolerated – what researchers call “culturally legitimized forms of violence.” This creates a spectrum in which some coercion is treated as ordinary. In some societies, what meets the international definition of rape – sexual contact obtained through force or coercion – is framed as an assertion of male authority rather than a crime.

Anthropologist Peggy Sanday’s landmark study of 156 societies found that rape is a vital part of a sociocultural configuration that revolves around intimate partner violence, male dominance, and an “ideology of toughness” in men and weakness in women. In other words, societies that celebrate aggressive masculinity and subordinate femininity produce higher rates of sexual violence – not because men are inherently violent, but because culture licenses that violence and removes accountability for it.

All these factors contribute to rape being frequently unreported. If rape is reported, it is seldom prosecuted; if prosecuted, the prosecution is rarely pursued in a gender-sensitive manner, often leading to few convictions, the re-victimization of survivors, and high attrition rates – resulting in a normalization of rape culture, stigmatization of victims, and impunity for perpetrators.

Misrecognition of victims and survivors 🔗

“Misrecognition” in this context means more than being ignored. It refers to the structural failure to acknowledge that a person has been harmed at all – to deny that their suffering is real, valid, or worthy of redress. For marginalized women, especially those from lower-caste communities, misrecognition operates at every level: family, community, law enforcement, and the courts.

The situation of Dalit women in India illustrates this with devastating clarity. Dalit women’s struggles are largely ignored in mainstream discussions of both gender and caste, making their voices even more silenced. They sit at the intersection of three hierarchies – caste, class, and gender – each of which independently diminishes their credibility and their access to justice. Feminist scholars have described this as the failure of both women’s movements, which have historically focused on caste-privileged women’s concerns, and anti-caste movements, which have sidelined women’s specific experiences.

Singularly positioned at the bottom of India’s caste, class, and gender hierarchies, Dalit women are exploited by those in power who carry out their attacks with impunity. Human Rights Watch has documented the use of sexual abuse against Dalit women as a tool by landlords and police to enforce social order, crush labor dissent, and intimidate entire communities. In all documented cases of such attacks, the accused state and private actors escaped punishment; in most cases, attacks were neither investigated nor prosecuted.

The numbers bear this out. India’s National Crime Records Bureau recorded over 400,000 incidents of crime against Dalits under the Prevention of Atrocities Act between 2014 and 2022, with crimes against Dalit women and girls constituting more than 15% of that total. During the same period, reported rapes of Dalit women and girls increased by nearly 90%. Yet conviction rates remain extremely low, and high acquittal rates persist – a direct consequence of structural barriers that prevent Dalit women from accessing justice.

Structural violence and the erasure of suffering 🔗

The misrecognition of Dalit women’s suffering is not incidental – it is structural. The caste system proclaims Dalit women to be intrinsically impure and “untouchable,” which sanctions their exploitation and social exclusion. This logic extends to how their experiences of violence are received: upper caste members of society do not consider Dalit women’s exploitation a crime, and Dalit women are not believed when they report rape.

The suffering of Dalit women is either ignored or deemed as inevitable due to their caste status, sustained by the normalization of caste-based oppression within Indian society. This is what misrecognition looks like in practice: not an absence of awareness, but an active decision by a society to assign certain women’s pain less value. Violence against Dalit women is systematically utilized to deny them opportunities, choices, and freedoms at multiple levels, undermining not only their dignity and self-respect, but also their right to development.

The 2020 Hathras case – in which a 19-year-old Dalit woman was gang-raped and murdered in Uttar Pradesh – brought this pattern into sharp global focus. The case drew national and international attention to the persistence of caste-based sexual violence. What followed was equally telling: authorities initially denied the severity of the assault, the victim’s family was pressured not to speak to media, and her body was cremated by police in the middle of the night without her family’s consent. Every step represented not just institutional failure, but institutional misrecognition – a refusal to treat her death as a matter warranting full accountability.

This pattern extends beyond caste to other forms of marginalization. The misogyny of state actors in many countries – typically within the criminal justice system – makes them unwilling to protect survivors. In some cases, state officials are even hostile toward women seeking protection from intimate partner violence. Misrecognition is not just a social attitude. It is embedded in the institutions that survivors must navigate to seek justice.

The “good woman / bad woman” divide 🔗

Closely tied to both impunity and misrecognition is a deeply entrenched cultural framework that sorts women into two categories: the “good woman” who is chaste, obedient, and domestically oriented, and the “bad woman” who deviates from those norms. This dichotomy does not just shape how women are perceived – it determines whether their experiences of violence are taken seriously.

The logic operates like this: if a woman is perceived as sexually “respectable,” her account of assault is more credible. If she is perceived as sexually active, sex-working, economically independent, or simply out of place – socially, geographically, or behaviorally – her account is questioned, minimized, or dismissed entirely. Rape myths, which are false, widespread, and persistent beliefs about rape, victims, and perpetrators, aim to deny and justify men’s sexual assault against women. These myths are the cultural mechanism through which the “good woman / bad woman” divide is enforced.

Rape myths are socially constructed to maintain patriarchal power structures, framing men as dominant and worth protecting, and women as passive, untrustworthy, and dispensable. They include ideas that only “certain types of women” are victimized, that women commonly lie about rape accusations, and that promiscuous women cannot truly be raped. Such myths suggest that women who dress a certain way, drink alcohol, or are perceived as “promiscuous” are somehow asking to be raped. Taken together, they create a cultural test that survivors must pass before their suffering is acknowledged.

How the divide operates in law and society 🔗

The “good woman / bad woman” framework is not confined to public opinion – it shapes courtrooms. Research has found that judges express the highest levels of rape myth acceptance among all institutional actors, with some believing that men from “good families” with “bright academic futures” do not fit the profile of a rapist – a myth that simultaneously protects perpetrators and discredits victims.

India’s legal history offers a stark illustration. In a widely cited 2016 Supreme Court case, three men were acquitted of raping a domestic worker after her roommate disclosed she engaged in sex work at night. The court stated that her behavior during the alleged assault was “far from being a survivor of sexual violence” – effectively ruling that her sexual history negated her ability to refuse consent. As legal scholars writing for the Journal for Law Students and Researchers noted, this decision rests entirely on the good woman / bad woman dichotomy, and finds no grounding in law or justice.

The chastity-based model of women’s credibility has colonial roots as well. In 19th-century India under British rule, non-dominant caste women were taxed for covering their bodies – their exposure was legally mandated as a marker of lower social status. The underlying logic was that upper-caste women’s bodies required protection because they symbolized family honor, while lower-caste women’s bodies were inherently available. The state as a patriarchal institution capitalized on these notions, associating “good” women with those who adhered to traditional norms and “bad” women with those who defied them. That colonial logic has never fully left – it persists in how courts assess credibility, how police respond to reports, and how communities receive survivors who do not fit the mold of the “ideal victim.”

Sex workers, “promiscuity,” and the limits of legal protection 🔗

No group is more acutely affected by the good / bad divide than women who engage in sex work. Women who engage in prostitution or other sexual acts for pay are specifically targeted with the rape myth that their regular engagement in sex means violence against them is not “real rape.” The myth positions their work as evidence of permanent consent – stripping them of the legal and moral standing to refuse any individual act.

This is a logical extreme of the purity-based framework. If a woman’s credibility as a victim depends on her perceived sexual “goodness,” then women positioned at the furthest end of the “bad” spectrum – sex workers, women who have had multiple partners, women who were not sober – are rendered structurally invisible as victims. Their suffering occurs, but culture refuses to recognize it as such.

Rape culture is a hegemonic force that protects perpetrators while denying victims’ and survivors’ experiences. Even after the global #MeToo movement, beliefs and perceptions about sexual violence continue to perpetuate rape myths and reaffirm harmful constructions of gender and sexuality. The cultural work of sorting women into worthy and unworthy victims is ongoing – and it is reinforced at every level, from the language of individual communities to the logic of legal systems.

The consequences of cultural impunity 🔗

When violence is culturally justified, when survivors are misrecognized, and when women are sorted into those whose pain counts and those whose pain doesn’t, the effects are not only individual. They are structural and generational. Survivors do not report. Communities do not intervene. Laws go unenforced. And perpetrators receive the implicit message that their actions carry no cost.

Violence against women is fueled by perpetrators’ negative sociocultural beliefs about women – patriarchal norms – and systemic, structural failures to respond based on those same beliefs that lead to unequal treatment and status. This means that changing individual perpetrators is insufficient. The norms that grant them impunity must also change, and that requires naming them clearly, challenging them consistently, and refusing to treat cultural tradition as justification for harm.

The experiences of Dalit women, of women in honor-culture contexts, of women whose assault is dismissed because of their occupation or sexual history – these are not isolated cases. They are the predictable outcomes of systems that assign different values to different women’s lives. Addressing and eliminating the root causes of gender inequality – including patriarchal values, unequal power relations, gender stereotypes, and harmful social norms – is not optional; it is a human rights imperative.

What do you think? If cultural norms determine whose suffering is recognized and whose is ignored, what does that mean for how we design legal systems and support services for survivors? And when a court or community dismisses a survivor’s account based on her caste, occupation, or sexual history, who is ultimately being protected – and at whose expense?

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