The Interplay of Structural Violence, Gender Inequality, and Sexism

When we think of violence against women, we usually picture a fist, a weapon, or a visible act of aggression. But a great deal of the harm women experience has no single attacker and no obvious moment of impact. It is woven into the everyday workings of society: into laws, wages, customs, and family structures. This is what peace researcher Johan Galtung called structural violence, and when we examine how it intersects with gender, we begin to see why women’s disadvantage is so persistent and so difficult to dislodge. To understand the full picture, we need to connect three things that are often discussed separately: structural violence, gender inequality, and sexism.

What structural violence actually means
Patriarchy as a structure of violence
From structure to direct harm
Sexism and the role of cultural norms
How patriarchy re-victimises women
Institutional discrimination and the gap between law and life
The economic dimension: neoliberalism and rural women
Why rural women are most disadvantaged
Seeing the connections

What structural violence actually means

The term structural violence was introduced by the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung in his 1969 essay Violence, Peace, and Peace Research. He argued that violence is not only the direct, physical harm one person inflicts on another. It also exists when social structures or institutions prevent people from meeting their basic needs, producing unequal life chances even when no individual can be blamed.

Galtung described this as violence built into the structure itself, showing up as unequal power and consequently as unequal opportunities to live a full life. Because there is no identifiable attacker, this kind of harm often appears ordinary, simply “the way things are.” Yet its consequences are severe: preventable disease, denied education, diminished potential, and in many cases early death. Galtung explicitly named systemic discrimination based on race, gender, and economic privilege as forms of structural violence.

Galtung later expanded this idea into a “violence triangle” connecting three forms of violence. Direct violence is the visible, physical act. Structural violence is the systemic inequality embedded in institutions. Cultural violence refers to aspects of culture, such as religion, ideology, and language, that legitimise the other two and make them appear acceptable or even natural. These three forms reinforce one another, which is exactly why gender inequality is so hard to break.

Patriarchy as a structure of violence

To see how structural violence operates against women, we need to look at patriarchy: a social system in which men hold dominant positions of power and women occupy a subordinate status. Patriarchy is not just a set of attitudes held by individuals. It is a structure that organises families, economies, and political institutions in ways that systematically advantage men.

One influential explanation of patriarchy’s origins comes from Friedrich Engels, who in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State traced male dominance to the rise of private property and inheritance. As land became something to be owned and passed on, women began to be treated as objects of property whose role was to procreate and maintain the family lineage, and men’s control over women became a tool for upholding their dominance within the household.

This structural arrangement matters because it shapes how women are treated across every domain of life. When researchers study domestic abuse, they consistently find it is not random but firmly embedded in patriarchal social structures and gender inequality. Patriarchy provides the foundation; the various forms of violence are its expressions.

From structure to direct harm

The clearest way structural violence reveals itself is through direct violence that the structure enables and excuses. Domestic abuse is the most common form of violence against women, and it occurs in every country, cutting across class, religion, and region. The scale in this country is sobering: data from the National Family Health Survey indicated that around a third of women surveyed had experienced domestic violence during their marriage, with physical violence being the most common form.

Crucially, this violence is closely tied to belief systems. A study of women’s experiences found that those whose partners held stronger patriarchal beliefs were significantly more likely to have been abused and were granted less freedom within their relationships. The structure of male dominance does not merely coexist with abuse; it produces it. Among married women who experienced domestic violence, the overwhelming majority identified their own husband as the perpetrator, underscoring that the home itself can be a site of structural harm.

Sexism and the role of cultural norms

If patriarchy is the structure and abuse is one of its outcomes, sexism is the cultural glue that holds the system together. Sexism is the set of beliefs and practices that treat women as inferior and justify their subordinate position. It is precisely the kind of cultural violence Galtung described, because it makes inequality seem normal.

In many households, women are still viewed as subordinate to men and expected to obey their husbands and male family members, with violence following when they do not comply. These expectations are not seen as oppressive by those who hold them; they are seen as tradition, as respect, as the proper order of things. Sometimes scriptural misinterpretations are used to suggest that women’s subordination is religiously mandated, lending a sense of moral authority to discrimination.

How patriarchy re-victimises women

One of the most damaging features of a sexist culture is the way it responds to women who try to speak up. In a collectivist society, the behaviour and reputation of women are often tied to the honour of the entire family, so many women continue to endure abuse in the name of protecting family honour, often referred to as izzat. When violence is normalised as an everyday occurrence, women themselves may come to see it as unremarkable, which reduces their willingness to seek help.

This is how the system re-victimises women. A woman who reports abuse may be blamed for bringing shame on her family, disbelieved, or pressured to reconcile. Her complaint is trivialised, the seriousness of her experience is dismissed, and she is left to carry both the original harm and the social cost of having named it. The structure protects itself by silencing those it harms.

Institutional discrimination and the gap between law and life

Structural violence also operates through formal institutions. On paper, this country has a strong framework for equality. Article 14 of the Constitution guarantees equality before the law and equal protection of the laws to every person. A series of laws targets specific injustices, including the Dowry Prohibition Act, the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, and the Equal Remuneration Act.

Yet a persistent gap separates legal rights from social reality. Strong constitutional provisions coexist with deep cultural norms, poverty, and weak enforcement that continue to constrain women’s equality in practice. Political representation illustrates this gap clearly. Even with reservation for women in local Panchayati Raj institutions, women hold only around 15 percent of seats in Parliament and 13 percent in state legislatures. The Women’s Reservation Act of 2023 promises a third of seats for women in Parliament and state assemblies, but its implementation has been deferred, illustrating how reform can be promised in principle while delayed in practice.

The economic dimension: neoliberalism and rural women

The most far-reaching form of structural violence against women may be economic, and it has intensified under neoliberal economic policies, the model of liberalisation, deregulation, and reduced public spending that this country adopted from the early 1990s. These policies promised growth, but their benefits and burdens have been distributed along sharply gendered lines.

A central feature of neoliberal labour markets is the shift away from secure factory employment toward flexible, decentralised, and insecure work, which tends to push down wages and strip away benefits. Women have been absorbed disproportionately into this insecure informal economy. Around 90 percent of all workers are employed in the informal economy, and women’s employment is overwhelmingly concentrated there, in work that is poorly paid and officially unrecognised.

Why rural women are most disadvantaged

Rural women sit at the sharpest edge of this process. As agricultural distress has pushed men to migrate to cities in search of work, women have been left to take on farm labour, a phenomenon known as the feminisation of agriculture. But this is not empowerment. Researchers point out that women’s rising share of farm work has no necessary connection to their social or economic empowerment and is instead strongly linked to poverty. Women earn meagre wages, rarely make decisions about land use or investment, and are largely excluded from credit and skill development.

The depth of this exclusion is captured in a single statistic: women make up more than 42 percent of the agricultural labour force but own less than 2 percent of farmland. They do the work without holding the assets. Low literacy and limited education compound the problem, leaving rural women with few options to enter better-paid or formal employment. Scholars have argued that the feminisation of agriculture is better described as the feminisation of agrarian distress, because it simply adds to women’s already heavy work burden.

This is why some analysts argue that under neoliberalism, capitalism and patriarchy work hand in glove, with the economic system offering women employment on terms that reinforce, rather than challenge, their subordinate position. The wider wage gap reflects this: according to ILO figures, the country has one of the highest gender wage gaps in the world, with a substantial difference in pay even after adjusting for field, hours, and experience.

Seeing the connections

The value of bringing these threads together is that it lets us stop treating women’s disadvantage as a collection of isolated problems. Domestic abuse, dismissive responses to women’s complaints, low political representation, and the poverty of rural women labourers are not separate issues. They are different expressions of the same underlying structure of patriarchy, legitimised by sexist cultural norms and amplified by an economic system that exploits women’s labour.

Addressing structural violence therefore requires more than punishing individual offenders. It means challenging the cultural narratives that make inequality seem natural, reforming institutions so that legal rights translate into lived reality, and building economic structures in which women can meet their needs with dignity and hold the assets they work to produce.

What do you think? If structural violence has no single attacker, who bears the responsibility for ending it: the state, communities, families, or all three? And can legal reforms like equal pay laws or political reservations succeed while the cultural norms that sustain sexism remain largely intact?

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Table of Contents

What structural violence actually means 🔗

Patriarchy as a structure of violence 🔗

From structure to direct harm 🔗

Sexism and the role of cultural norms 🔗

How patriarchy re-victimises women 🔗

Institutional discrimination and the gap between law and life 🔗

The economic dimension: neoliberalism and rural women 🔗

Why rural women are most disadvantaged 🔗

Seeing the connections 🔗