Description

Abstract

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,’ using Sally Haslanger’s definition: ‘a network of events and causal relations between them that produce systemic wrongs and harms, including entrenched patterns of oppression and domination.’ Furthermore, as Robin Dembroff has argued, identifying the essential ideology of patriarchy as an unjust social system and the crucial role it plays with respect to domestic abuse 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.’ Crucially, they help us to identify systemic injustice at a high level of description, and across a broad range of contexts, across history and culture, to consider how to meaningfully resist that form of injustice.

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.

About the speaker

Shazia Choudhry is a Professor in the Faculty of Law and Hackney Fellow in Law at Wadham College. She was appointed Academic Fellow of the Inner Temple from 2014-2017 and was elected as an Academic Bencher in 2020. Her research is focused on gender, human rights and violence against women and seeks to examine various dimensions of these areas from an interdisciplinary and feminist perspective. In doing so she employs doctrinal, theoretical and empirical methods. Her scholarship sits at the interface of criminal law, public law (particularly human rights law) and family law.