The Connection Between Patriarchy and Violence in India

In India, gender-based violence is not a series of isolated incidents. It is the predictable output of a social system built on patriarchal foundations – one that determines who holds power, whose body is considered property, and whose suffering gets dismissed as a private matter. Understanding violence against women in India means examining how patriarchy operates as a structural force, not merely a set of bad attitudes. It means looking at laws that encode male privilege, and at economic systems that intensify women’s vulnerability. The connection between patriarchy and violence is not incidental – it is by design.

How patriarchy creates the conditions for violence 🔗

Patriarchy, at its core, is a system that places men as primary authority figures across family, community, and state structures. Research on domestic violence in Indian communities consistently shows that patriarchal ideology – encompassing beliefs about women’s inherent inferiority, men’s right to control decision-making, and the condoning of violence as a corrective – directly correlates with higher rates of abuse. These are not fringe beliefs. According to survey data, 42% of men and 52% of women in India believed a husband is justified in beating his wife for reasons as ordinary as going outside without telling him, arguing, or not cooking properly. The fact that women themselves have internalized these justifications reflects how deeply patriarchal norms are absorbed across the social fabric.

Social and cultural norms, alongside patriarchal attitudes particularly prominent in northern regions, prescribe discriminatory roles and responsibilities along gender lines – and deviation from these roles is treated as a provocation. Women are expected to be obedient wives, dutiful daughters-in-law, and self-sacrificing mothers. When they step outside this script, violence is deployed as a mechanism of enforcement.

The normalization of abuse as a social mechanism 🔗

Violence normalized as an everyday occurrence is a core feature of patriarchal ideology in Indian society, and it directly affects women’s willingness to address abuse in their own lives. In a collectivist society where a woman’s actions are seen as reflecting the honor of the entire family, many women absorb abuse rather than report it. The concept of izzat – family honor – becomes a tool that traps women in abusive situations. Reporting violence is reframed not as self-protection, but as betrayal of the family.

This social architecture is reinforced from multiple directions: family structures that place women under male authority, religious texts that prescribe female subservience, and community institutions that treat abuse as a domestic matter. Gender-based violence in India is deeply rooted in social and cultural structures and is carried out with the intention to humiliate and assert superiority within family, community, and society. The Council of Europe’s framing of GBV as “deeply rooted in social and cultural structures” applies with particular force in the Indian context, where ancient texts like the Manusmriti codified the subservience of women to male relatives across every stage of their lives.

From dowry to honor killings: violence across the spectrum 🔗

Patriarchal violence in India does not take a single form. Women in India have been victims of infanticide, selective abortions, sex trafficking, stalking, dowry demands, child marriages, acid attacks, and honor killings – each a distinct expression of the same underlying logic: that women’s bodies and lives are subordinate to male authority and family reputation.

Dowry-related violence is one of the starkest illustrations. Contextual research on gender-based violence in India identifies dowry expectations and violence related to those demands as a unique societal-level contributor to abuse, including dowry-related homicides that occur via torture of women by husbands or in-laws. Honor killings represent the extreme end of the same continuum – women killed by male family members for perceived transgressions against family honor, which still occurs in India and represents perhaps the most extreme expression of patriarchal attitudes about women’s roles.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, a crime against women in India is reported every three minutes, two women are raped every sixty minutes, and a young married woman is found beaten to death or burned every six hours. These numbers do not capture the full scale of the problem, since the vast majority of cases go unreported.

Legal frameworks and their patriarchal limitations 🔗

India has enacted significant legislation aimed at protecting women from violence. The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (2005), the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act (2013), and various amendments to the Indian Penal Code all represent meaningful legislative progress. Yet the persistence of violence at scale reveals a structural gap between law on paper and justice in practice – and nowhere is this gap more visible than in the question of marital rape.

The marital rape exception: law as a tool of patriarchy 🔗

India is one of the fewest countries in the world that explicitly decriminalizes marital rape. Exception 2 of Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code states that sexual intercourse by a man with his own wife is not rape – a provision based on the archaic patriarchal notion that a woman irrevocably consents to sex once she enters matrimony.

This exception is not a colonial-era relic that was overlooked. It has been actively defended. The 2023 legal amendments, which were anticipated to address this gap, failed to include the criminalization of marital rape, maintaining the exemption and highlighting deep-rooted societal and cultural resistance to recognizing non-consensual sexual acts within marriage as a crime. Despite the Justice Verma Committee recommending full criminalization in the aftermath of the 2012 Nirbhaya case, successive governments have declined to act.

The National Family Health Survey found that between 2019-2021, 32% of married women experienced physical, sexual, or emotional violence by their current husbands, and 82% of married women who had experienced sexual violence reported their current husbands as the perpetrators. Yet the law offers these women no criminal remedy against their abusers.

The Marital Rape Exception exemplifies a systemic devaluation of constitutional principles – where the institution of matrimony paradoxically strips women of fundamental protections they would otherwise possess, allowing patriarchal norms to masquerade as legal principles. Legal scholars argue this is a direct violation of Articles 14, 15, and 21 of the Indian Constitution, which guarantee equality, non-discrimination, and the right to life and personal liberty. As the Supreme Court held in Shayara Bano v. Union of India, laws that operate on patriarchal assumptions about women’s roles in marriage are inherently discriminatory and violate constitutional principles of equality.

When law reflects rather than challenges social norms 🔗

An analysis of India’s policy response to gender-based violence reveals that while laws exist to protect women, they are principally punitive in nature, failing to address the patriarchal structure, gender-biased perceptions that affect implementation, inadequate institutional infrastructure, and gaps in rehabilitation services for survivors.

The problem goes beyond what laws say – it extends to how they are enforced. Hesitancy to involve police is a significant barrier for survivors, driven by inadequate police response including dismissal of complaints and bribery, as well as the broad social stigma attached to reporting domestic violence. When the institutions meant to deliver justice are themselves embedded in patriarchal norms, legal protections become formal guarantees without practical force.

Patriarchy is well-reflected in the language of Indian laws themselves. The gender binary focus in criminal codes, where all references address only man and woman, institutionally refuses to acknowledge violence faced by people elsewhere on the gender spectrum. This structural limitation means that legal reform, while necessary, is insufficient without a simultaneous transformation of the social norms that animate both the perpetration of violence and the institutional responses to it.

The intersection of capitalism, class, and patriarchal violence 🔗

Patriarchy does not operate in isolation from economic systems. In India, the convergence of feudal patriarchal values with capitalist development has created a particularly potent form of gendered oppression – one where class position determines the nature and intensity of violence a woman faces, and where economic vulnerability becomes a mechanism of control.

Capitalism’s role in intensifying women’s oppression 🔗

Feudal and patriarchal values in India have conjoined with capitalism – first introduced through colonization, then reinforced by global financial institutions – to reinforce and continue women’s oppression in various ways. The result is that violence against women has increased rather than diminished with modernization.

The dowry system offers a clear illustration of how these forces interact. Dowry, once restricted to upper and middle castes in pre-capitalist India, is now rapidly spreading to other castes and communities. While dowry was always a means of subjugating women, it now assumes violent and cruel forms under capitalist consumer culture, with women tortured by in-laws to extract more wealth, and in many cases, burned alive. What was once a localized, caste-specific practice has been transformed by capitalist consumption norms into a mechanism of lethal extraction that cuts across caste and class.

Engels argued that the rise of private property and capitalism intensified patriarchy by relegating women from productive economic roles into unpaid domestic labor. Working women in India actually face a higher likelihood of physical violence – nearly 40% of working women have experienced physical violence compared to 26% of non-working women – pointing to a patriarchal retaliation against women who dare to occupy public and economic space. Economic participation, rather than offering straightforward protection, can trigger additional violence when it is perceived as a violation of prescribed gender roles.

Class, caste, and the unequal distribution of violence 🔗

Women’s exposure to violence in India is not uniform – it is stratified by both class and caste in ways that compound one another. Despite several laws meant to protect them, Dalit women and men who are dependent on upper castes for livelihoods have little recourse against oppression and violence. Dalit women, who are largely agricultural laborers, are among the lowest-paid workers in the Indian economy and face triple subjugation along the lines of caste, class, and gender.

The economic dependency that capitalism produces for lower-class women deepens their entrapment in abusive situations. Poverty and lack of education increase the risk of domestic violence, as women may lack the resources to leave abusive situations or to seek help. Economic empowerment, conversely, functions as a protective factor – but as the data on working women’s exposure to violence illustrates, it does not provide immunity in a society where male authority is tied to controlling women’s mobility and labor.

The persistence of pre-capitalist structures and feudal survivals in India is significant in producing the specifically Indian variant of patriarchal oppression. Unlike in countries where capitalist development dismantled pre-capitalist social structures, in India the “old community” associated with pre-capitalist structure continues to persist alongside capitalist economic relations. The result is an especially durable form of oppression in which feudal patriarchal norms – caste hierarchy, family honor, male property rights over women’s bodies – are not dissolved by economic modernization but instead fused with new forms of capitalist exploitation.

Neoliberalism and the erosion of protective structures 🔗

In neoliberal times, with the state adopting austerity measures, there is a global cutback in social spending. Any state that pursues such policies needs to persuade women to accept the burden of housework as “women’s work,” and to dissuade women from rejecting traditional roles – actively reinvesting in patriarchal structures to ensure the reproduction of labor at no cost to capital. Care work, domestic labor, agricultural labor – the economic systems that run on women’s unpaid and underpaid contribution have a material interest in keeping patriarchal control intact.

The struggle for gender justice in India therefore cannot be separated from the struggle for economic justice. Organizations like AIDWA have long argued that a true transformation toward gender equality is inseparable from improvements in the material conditions of working-class women and those from marginalized castes – recognizing that violence against women is not merely a cultural problem to be addressed through awareness campaigns, but a structural problem embedded in the economic relations of a capitalist-patriarchal society.

The connection between patriarchy and violence in India is, ultimately, a story about power – who has it, who enforces it, and which institutions protect it. Legal reform matters, but the limits of law in a patriarchal society are real and documented. Economic empowerment matters, but capitalism has proven capable of absorbing women’s labor without dismantling the structures that keep them vulnerable. What changes the equation is the simultaneous challenge to patriarchal norms at the level of family, community, law, and economy – recognizing that violence against women is not a private tragedy but a public, structural failure.

What do you think? If legal frameworks in India already guarantee equality under Articles 14 and 21, why do those guarantees fail so consistently in cases of gender-based violence – and is legal reform sufficient on its own? And given that working women in India face higher rates of physical violence than non-working women, what does this tell us about the relationship between economic participation and patriarchal control?

References

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