'Paying attention to Patriarchy – ‘Patriarchal Forestalling’ and Systemic Injustice for Victims of Domestic Abuse in India.'

Event date
1 May 2025
Event time
15:30 - 17:00
Oxford week
TT 1
Audience
Anyone
Venue
Wharton Room - All Souls College (and online)

Notes & Changes

Please note that this event will be recorded, if you do not wish to be part of the recording, please feel free to turn your cameras off once the talk begins. The talk will be made available on the Criminology website and YouTube channel at a later date. 

 

Registration closes at midday on Wednesday 30th April. The Teams link will be sent to you that afternoon.

Patriarchy has been defined as "a system of social structures, and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women."   While these structures can be seen in the larger society, they are also seen in the familial unit, in which patriarchal tradition, practices, and ideals are vertically transmitted from generation to generation. 

Patriarchy also constitutes an ‘unjust social system,’ (Haslanger) which allows it to do its ‘vital explanatory work’ in terms of predicting, identifying, and explaining various patterns of wrongful treatment--patterns that track particular (actual or perceived) features.  This, Dembroff argues helps us to more accurately determine what kinds of actions or policies will most effectively change those patterns in the future.’

Despite this, patriarchy as an analytical tool has, I argue, fallen off the theoretical agenda within the field of violence against women and domestic abuse.  In recent years there has been a definitive shift towards theorising individual experiences of abuse and systemic considerations for victims as various manifestations of ‘coercive control’ and a focus on the appropriate legislative and policy response to new and emerging forms of violence against women, such as image based sexual abuse.  I argue, that in doing so, not enough attention is being paid to the general account of patriarchy as an unjust social system, where, I argue, the real solution to eradicating violence against women can be found.

Using a recent empirical study of the effectiveness of domestic violence legislation and policy in three states in India (funded by the British Academy) I demonstrate how patriarchy operates as an unjust social system and how a combination of patriarchal practices within formal and informal justice mechanisms and wider familial and social networks combine to produce what I term the ‘patriarchal forestalling’ of justice for victims of domestic abuse. I conclude that it is only by recognising the systemic injustice in operation at this high level of description that we can consider how to meaningfully resist it in terms of actions and policies.

Found within

Criminology