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Paper short abstract:

Violence-justifying-attitudes represent harmful gender social norms led by patriarchal biases. In Punjab,Pakistan, women besides men accept and justify violence by husbands/men as a norm. Education may play a significant role in altering negative attitudes perpetuating violence and social injustice

Paper long abstract:

Violence-justifying-attitudes constitute sticky gender norms and provide a premise for violence-against-women, perpetuate gender inequalities and disrupt social justice. The situation is even worse in Pakistan where patriarchy constitutes complex power-hierarchies and necessitates violence for its existence, male dominance and subjugation of women to men. Such patriarchal violence or male violence-against-women(Kaufman, 2023) is pervasive in Punjab. The present study examines how Education impacts Violence Justifying Attitudes of both women and men in a patriarchal setup. It then captures the impact of the urban-rural marginalisation. Empirical evidence, based on married men and women sample, shows a significant impact of education in reducing acceptance of male violence against women by both men and women with more pronounced impact of education at all primary, secondary and higher levels on reducing the violence justifying attitudes of rural women. Among control factors positively contributing toward reducing negative attitudes are exposure to TV/media, women's inheritance of land/house, wealth, financial inclusion, involvement in decision making(social-empowerment) and age-at-first-birth; while factors accentuating violence-acceptance include living in large households in urban area, more dependent children and men doing low-scale job. Wealth of a woman makes husband education and age insignificant. Also, Head of the household being a female and women’s employment do not matter. At policy level, education should be paid attention to encouraging rural women in particular. Also TV programs promoting women's financial and social empowerment can be very useful in managing harmful (pro-violence) gendered social norms and to catalyse social justice.