Deciphering the messages of gender violence: a typological approach and application in the context of gender violence in Africa

Abstract

Gender violence has drawn academic and political attention due to its pervasiveness in practically every society in the world. Although gender violence sparked debates within the international feminist movement back in the 1970s, it took decades for political leaders and international organisations to come to terms with its meaning.  It has since become crystallised in a variety of resolutions and recommendations of the United Nations, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW, 1979) and its subsequent protocols and recommendations, and the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action (1993). Nevertheless, much of the debate in the political arena has equated gender violence with violence against women and girls, eschewing a much broader and necessary understanding of social gender hierarchies and their relationship with violence. Feminists across various fields have highlighted the importance of such an understanding since for them gender-based violence cannot be fully addressed without questioning the gender order that structures societies in disadvantageous ways for women, girls, LGBTQI+ and other feminised subjects. Therefore, the bulk of feminist literature on this issue has resorted to gender analytic tools to scrutinise the meanings of different acts of violence that target the aforementioned gendered subjects. Most analyses focus on single-case studies, which help to draw a more complete picture of the gender structures that lead to violence, but with the already expected drawback of not being able to extrapolate the results from one case to another. Nonetheless, this single-case approach has allowed feminists across various disciplines to accumulate precious knowledge about the causes and consequences of gender-based violence under different contexts and circumstances. It is not surprising, thus, that feminists have attempted to theorise gender violence at different levels (individual, collective, and global), aiming simultaneously to link social gender hierarchies to the acts of violence and the overarching context under which they take place. In International Relations, feminist scholarship devoted to the study of war and conflict has been particularly aware of the relevance of gender-based violence, especially in contexts of social breakdown due to conflict. Several studies have focused on sexual violence as a disruptive and extreme act of violence that acquires prominence as a war strategy, while many methodological approaches – such as interviews with victims and perpetrators, causal analysis, comparative analysis – have been mobilised to map it, and understand its meanings and implications. Other types of violence have also drawn feminists’ attention, such as intimate partner violence and domestic violence, sexual slavery, female genital mutilation/cutting, and battering, to name a few, and some theorists advocate that they are all connected as part of society’s gender hierarchies. Nonetheless, articulating a fully-fledged theory of gender violence that accounts for this multifaceted phenomenon has been challenging. Some attempts focus on the persistent gender inequalities of society, the intersections between gender and ethnicity, the social breakdown during domestic and international conflict, and the military structures operating during wartime and peacetime. In this paper, we draw on recent literature that underscores the political dimension of gender violence. Instead of analysing acts of violence in isolation, we argue that they constitute a political act that is at once gendered and gendering. Gender-based violence, therefore, must be seen as the resulting interconnection of society’s gender hierarchies that aim to control and subordinate women and feminised subjects. As a political act, gender violence delivers messages to individual victims and their communities. Deciphering these messages, hence, is paramount to making sense of gender violence in different contexts, whilst unravelling the interconnections between different acts of violence. While patriarchy is an underlying factor, its manifestations in the form of gender-based violence conveys various messages that cannot be reduced to one single cause. Therefore, we mobilise a typology of these messages that incorporates simultaneously two axes: wartime-peacetime v. symbolic-physical violence. The first axis captures the circumstances under which gender-based violence takes place, departing from the assumption that the meanings of violence in wartime are different from those in peacetime. The second axis focuses on the nature of violence, whether physical or symbolic. The psychological and social dimensions of violence are equally relevant and are captured by the symbolic axis. The combination of these axes allows for the categorisation of acts of violence and the deciphering of their messages. We resort to an extensive review of the literature on gender-based violence to build this typology, as well as on the writings of Rita Laura Segato and Verónica Gago, who have highlighted the importance of interpreting the gendered messages of violent acts. We identify four types of messages: dehumanisation and annihilation, silencing shame and dishonour, body and sexuality control, and subalternity and agency denial. We then apply the typology to briefly assess the situation of gender violence in Africa. We review data and studies on the topic, attempting to “read” the aforementioned messages conveyed by gender-based violence. We observe that our typological approach can be easily incorporated to the analysis of gender violence, attesting its potential as a conceptual-cum-theoretical framework. Evidently, further research will be needed to fully grasp the analytical prospects of this typology. As per this pioneering study, we contend that if we are to take seriously the interconnectedness of acts of violence, examining the intricate relations of different forms of gender violence is paramount to reconstructing the connections between the acts themselves. Mapping their meanings and how they transcend from particular to collective is, hence, an essential part of strategising against gender violence, more broadly, and violence against women, more specifically. This has important consequences for policy making, for the messages entailed in gender-based violence reveal the underlying structures of society that must be transformed in order to combat the problem. Feminists have been calling for such a gender-based approach for a long time, and in the particular case of gender violence, our typology provides a conceptual framework to advance knowledge on this topic. In so doing, it may open avenues for political intervention aimed at deeper social and political transformations, and the ultimate eradication of gender violence.