Every year, roughly one in three women worldwide experiences physical or sexual violence at some point in her life. That is not a distant statistic from a faraway country. It plays out in homes, colleges, workplaces, and public transport across India too. Gender Based Violence, or GBV, is not a single incident or a private family matter. It is a pattern rooted in how power is distributed between genders, and understanding it is the first step toward changing it.
Table of Contents
Defining gender based violence
Gender Based Violence refers to violence that is expressed differently depending on a person’s sex, and often intersects with race, class, religion, sexuality, ability, and other social markers. This means GBV does not affect everyone equally. A woman’s experience of violence can look very different depending on her caste, income, disability status, or sexual orientation, even if the underlying cause, unequal power, remains the same.
GBV is not confined to the home. It shows up in private spaces like marriages and families, and equally in public spaces like streets, offices, and educational institutions. The idea that violence within a household is a private matter, separate from public concern, is precisely the assumption that GBV as a concept challenges.
The term itself has a specific origin. It grew out of the battered women’s movement of the 1970s, a grassroots effort led by feminist activists in the West during the second wave of feminism. Before this movement, domestic abuse was rarely treated as a distinct social problem requiring institutional response. Activists began setting up shelters and support networks for abused women, which gradually shifted public understanding of intimate partner violence from a private misfortune to a systemic issue demanding legal and policy attention.
Historical context and global advocacy
The global push to recognise GBV as a serious human rights issue gained real momentum through the United Nations Decade for Women, spanning 1976 to 1985. During this period, four major international women’s conferences were held: Mexico City in 1975, Copenhagen in 1980, Nairobi in 1985, and later Beijing in 1995. Each of these gatherings brought together government representatives and women’s rights advocates to discuss issues ranging from pay equity to violence against women.
The Nairobi conference in 1985 is widely regarded as a turning point, since it was the first time governments collectively acknowledged violence, including domestic violence, as a pervasive problem rather than an isolated occurrence. A decade later, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, adopted by 189 countries, formally placed violence against women among the critical areas requiring coordinated global action.
This sustained advocacy pushed national governments to move gender based violence from the margins into mainstream development policy. Countries began drafting domestic legislation, setting up dedicated ministries, and funding support services, largely because feminist movements had spent decades insisting that violence against women was a matter of state responsibility, not private shame.
Why the private versus public distinction mattered
For a long time, legal systems around the world treated what happened inside a marriage or household as outside the reach of the state. This meant that a woman assaulted by her husband had far less legal recourse than a woman assaulted by a stranger. Feminist advocacy dismantled this distinction by arguing, successfully, that the state has an obligation to protect individuals from violence regardless of where it occurs. This is part of why the CEDAW Committee’s General Recommendation No. 35 explicitly addresses due diligence obligations of the state, even when the violence is committed by private individuals rather than government actors.
Forms of gender based violence
GBV is not limited to physical assault. It includes a wide range of behaviours that share a common root: the assertion of power and control based on gender.
Common forms
Domestic and intimate partner violence: Physical, sexual, or emotional harm inflicted by a spouse or family member within the home. National data from India’s National Family Health Survey shows a significant proportion of ever-married women report experiencing spousal violence, and official crime records suggest this is likely an undercount given how few cases are formally reported.
Sexual violence and harassment: This ranges from rape and coerced sex to unwelcome comments, groping, and stalking, occurring in homes, workplaces, and public spaces alike.
Harmful traditional practices: Customs such as child marriage, dowry-related abuse, and female genital mutilation, which are often justified through cultural or religious framing but function to control women’s bodies and choices.
Economic abuse: Restricting a person’s access to money, employment, education, or property, effectively limiting their independence and ability to leave an abusive situation.
Psychological abuse: Threats, humiliation, isolation from family and friends, and constant surveillance or control, which often precede or accompany physical violence.
What connects all these forms is that they are rooted in patriarchal structures that normalise male dominance and treat female subordination as ordinary or even acceptable. Recognising this shared root is important, because it shows why GBV cannot be solved by addressing one form in isolation. A law against domestic violence does little if workplace harassment and economic control remain unaddressed.
Policy and legal frameworks
The recognition of GBV as a human rights violation, rather than a private or cultural matter, has driven the creation of international and national legal instruments. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), adopted in 1979, remains the primary international treaty addressing discrimination against women. Its General Recommendation No. 19, issued in 1992, first defined gender based violence as a form of discrimination prohibited under the Convention. This was updated by General Recommendation No. 35 in 2017, which strengthened state obligations and called for the repeal of laws that excuse or facilitate violence.
In India, the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 represents a significant legislative milestone. It was the first Indian law to define domestic violence broadly, covering physical, sexual, verbal, emotional, and economic abuse, and it introduced civil remedies such as protection orders, residence rights, and monetary relief. The Ministry of Women and Child Development administers this Act alongside criminal provisions under the Indian Penal Code, such as Section 498A dealing with cruelty by a husband or his relatives.
The implementation gap
Having a law on paper is not the same as survivors being able to use it. Studies analysing India’s National Family Health Survey data have found that a large majority of women who experience intimate partner violence never seek any formal help, whether from police, healthcare providers, or legal services. Barriers include fear of social stigma, financial dependence on the abuser, lack of awareness about legal rights, and, in many cases, distrust that the system will actually help them.
This gap between legislation and lived reality is a recurring theme across countries. Laws can criminalise violence, but without accessible complaint mechanisms, trained police and judiciary, and social support systems like shelters and counselling, survivors often have nowhere practical to turn.
Addressing GBV through gender sensitization
Gender sensitization is the process of helping people recognise and question the attitudes, stereotypes, and social norms that make gender based violence possible in the first place. It is not just about teaching people that violence is wrong, most people already know that. It is about unpacking the everyday beliefs that quietly excuse or minimise it, such as the idea that a husband has authority over his wife’s choices, or that a woman’s clothing or behaviour explains why she was harassed.
Understanding GBV as a manifestation of unequal power relations, rather than as isolated bad behaviour by a few individuals, changes how prevention efforts are designed. Instead of only responding after violence occurs, gender sensitization aims to shift the underlying culture that tolerates it.
What effective responses look like
A comprehensive response to GBV typically combines several elements working together:
Education: Introducing discussions on gender equality, consent, and healthy relationships early in school and college curricula.
Awareness campaigns: Public messaging that challenges harmful norms and informs people of their legal rights and available support services.
Survivor support services: Accessible helplines, shelters, legal aid, and counselling that make it easier for survivors to seek help without fear of judgment.
Institutional accountability: Training police, healthcare workers, and judicial officers to respond to GBV cases sensitively and effectively, rather than dismissing or mishandling them.
None of these interventions work in isolation. A well-drafted law without trained implementers achieves little, and an awareness campaign without accessible support services can raise expectations that the system then fails to meet. Real progress on GBV requires all these pieces moving together, which is exactly why the issue continues to demand attention decades after it first entered global policy conversations.
What do you think? Why do you think the gap between legal protections and their actual use by survivors remains so wide, even decades after laws like the PWDVA were passed? And how much of preventing gender based violence do you think depends on changing everyday attitudes versus stricter enforcement of existing laws?
References
- https://circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov/2015/10/15/domestic-violence-in-the-1970s/
- https://www.unwomen.org/en/how-we-work/intergovernmental-support/world-conferences-on-women
- https://www.ohchr.org/en/treaty-bodies/cedaw/launch-cedaw-general-recommendation-no-35-gender-based-violence-against-women-updating-general
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11193235/
- https://wcd.nic.in/policies/protection-women-domestic-violence-act-2005
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9764516/
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