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Despite global attention to humanitarian security and commitments to ‘localisation’, violence against local women aid workers remains under-researched. This paper argues that dominant security frameworks obscure gendered and place-based experiences of violence and advances alternative frameworks.

Paper long abstract

Despite growing global attention to humanitarian security and international commitments to ‘localisation’, gendered violence against aid workers, particularly those embedded in local contexts, remains under-researched. Local women aid workers face multiple forms of violence, including legal, regulatory, socio-religious restrictions, as a direct result of their humanitarian work. As conflict-affected women from the global south, they face intersecting forms of marginalisation that exclude them from global debates on aid worker security and humanitarian access. Anchored in a feminist and justice-centred methodology, this paper interrogates existing datasets and conducts a discourse analysis of global policy on aid worker security. It builds on and critiques current theories related to aid worker security, protection and restraint by armed actors, and argues that dominant security frameworks obscure gendered and place-based experiences of violence. It advances alternative frameworks that centre decolonial feminist perspectives, challenging dominant security paradigms and informing more equitable humanitarian practice.

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Drawing on 142 interviews, this paper presents a new framework for recognising economic abuse that occurs before or during the formation of an intimate union and is based on the Pre-Marital/Union Economic Power and Control Wheel: South Asian Contexts —a model recently approved by The Duluth Model.

Paper long abstract

This paper presents a new framework for recognising economic abuse that occurs prior to or during the formation of intimate relationships, based on the Pre-Marital/Union Economic Power and Control Wheel: South Asian Contexts (India, Pakistan, Britain)—a model recently approved by The Duluth Model. Using an intersectional approach, the wheel draws on 142 interviews and eight focus groups involving 64 women (total 206 women) from two research projects with South Asian women in India, Pakistan and the UK (funded by National Institute of health Research and Global Challenges Research Fund, UK). These women were recruited from community networks and represented diversity on the basis of class, caste, religion, occupational status and migration status. The majority of the women were living with their partners and had not reported cases of domestic violence. The wheel is based on retrospective data from women who reflected on the months and years leading up to marriage. Approximately one/third women reported some form of economic abuse described in the wheel that took place up to the point of marriage. In almost all cases the economic abuse carried on after the marriage and became worse. This wheel aims to identify various forms of economic abuse to raise awareness among policy makers, practitioners, women, young people and community members to enable identification and prevention before women get married/cohabit/form a union. The identification and prevention of the pre-marital economic abuse is particularly urgent considering the connection between climate shock, livelihood loss and displacement, and early/forced marriages in South Asia.

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Despite higher development, women in Southern India are far more likely to justify intimate partner violence than elsewhere. Using NFHS-5 data and nonlinear decomposition, we show that neighbourhood-level norms, not individual empowerment explain most of this paradox.

Paper long abstract

Conventional empowerment theories suggest that women in more developed regions should be less likely to justify Intimate Partner Violence (IPV). In India, however, a stark paradox emerges. Our analytical sample reveals that women in the more developed Southern states are dramatically more likely to justify IPV (77.4%) compared to women in the rest of India (37.6%). This study investigates the drivers of this "Southern Paradox" using nonlinear decomposition methods on a national sample of 56,421 currently married women. The analysis quantifies how much of the regional gap is explained by differences in observed characteristics (endowments) versus differences in the returns to those characteristics (coefficients). The decomposition analysis shows a striking finding: differences in individual empowerment indicators like education and wealth explain very little of the gap. Instead, the vast majority of the explained regional difference is attributable to a single factor: higher average IPV justification at the neighbourhood level (62.6%). These findings demonstrate that powerful neighbourhood-level norms can override the protective effects of individual empowerment, suggesting that policy interventions must directly target collective attitudes to successfully combat the normalization of violence.

JEL Classification numbers: J11, J12, J16, O12

Keywords: Intimate Partner Violence; Southern Paradox; Social Norms; Women Empowerment; NFHS-5; India.

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This paper examines how multilevel normative and economic pathways shape intimate partner violence in Mauritania. Results show that physical/sexual IPV is shaped by injunctive norms on violence while non-physical IPV follows an economic pioneering penalty conditional on union exit credibility.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on original data from 2,400 households across 133 villages, this study examines how community gender norms and local economic contexts interact with individual characteristics to shape intimate partner violence (IPV) risk among poor Mauritanian households. Mauritania’s legal and cultural context –where women’s empowerment and access to paid work are socially and legally constrained, yet female-initiated divorce is prevalent and socially accepted– enables an empirical separation of normative and economic channels. We distinguish physical and sexual IPV from non-physical violence (psychological abuse, economic coercion and controlling behaviors). Results show that these dimensions of IPV operate through distinct multilevel pathways. Physical and sexual IPV is primarily driven by the normative channel and follows a contextual reinforcement mechanism: women who reject the legitimacy of violence face lower risk, and this protection is stronger in communities where such views are widely shared. Non-physical IPV is more closely tied to the economic channel through a pioneering penalty mechanism. Individual employment increases women’s risk of non-physical abuse, but this effect attenuates where female employment is common. We find no evidence that this moderation reflects greater normative acceptance of women’s work in high-employment communities. Instead, elevated risk for “pioneer” workers emerges only when two conditions intersect: paid work remains uncommon and divorce rates are high. In these settings, employment constitutes an empowering norm violation in a context that facilitates union exit, triggering preemptive violence. These findings refine the Pioneering Hypothesis by underscoring its contingency: descriptive norm deviations heighten IPV only when they credibly signal autonomy.

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This paper conceptualises induced complicity as an advanced tactic of coercive control. Drawing on a scoping review of interdisciplinary literature and qualitative evidence from NGO reports, it identifies how perpetrators weaponize shame, fear of exposure, and legal vulnerability to entrap victims

Paper long abstract

Abstract

Contemporary understandings of intimate partner violence (IPV) increasingly recognize coercive control as a patterned strategy of domination extending beyond physical abuse. However, one critical dimension remains under-theorised: the deliberate induction of victims into criminal, unethical, or highly stigmatised acts, which perpetrators later exploit to silence, threaten, or entrap them. This paper conceptualises this phenomenon as induced complicity and examines it as an advanced tactic of coercive control. Drawing on a scoping review of interdisciplinary literature from criminology, psychology, gender studies, and digital sociology, alongside qualitative evidence from NGO reports and verified online survivor narratives, the paper synthesises global patterns of manipulative entrapment within intimate relationships. It identifies key domains where induced complicity operates, including coerced involvement in financial fraud, substance-related offences, technology-facilitated sexual exploitation and digitally mediated evidence traps. Across contexts, perpetrators weaponize shame, emotional dependency, fear of exposure, and legal vulnerability to blur victim boundaries and restrict avenues for exit or disclosure. The analysis situates induced complicity within coercive control theory, trauma bonding, and feminist criminology, demonstrating how gendered power relations, digital technologies, and cultural stigma intensify victims’ legal and moral captivity. The paper argues that failure to recognise induced complicity risks the misidentification and criminalisation of coerced victims within justice systems. By reframing induced complicity as a distinct mechanism of coercive control, this study contributes to emerging debates on IPV in the digital age and highlights implications for law reform, trauma-informed practice, and survivor-centred policy responses.

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Using an experiment with 3,000+ respondents, this paper tests a survivor-centered variation of WHO’s IPV survey instrument by reversing the ordering of the lifetime and past-6-month questions, and examines whether reducing double confirmation affects violence disclosure and respondent satisfaction.

Paper long abstract

This paper proposes a variation of the World Health Organization’s gold-standard protocols for collecting data on intimate partner violence (IPV), aimed at reducing respondents’ distress. Standard survey instruments first ask whether respondents have ever experienced a set of behavioral characterizations of violence and, if so, follow with a question on whether the episode occurred in the past six months. This strategy requires survivors to confirm potentially traumatic experiences twice. Instead, we propose an alternative sequencing that first asks about the experiences of violence in the past six months and only proceeds to the “ever” question if the respondent reports experiencing no violence in the past six months. This strategy preserves multiple reporting opportunities while minimizing repeated confirmation among victims and survivors. We randomly assign the two versions of the survey to a sample of over 3,000 respondents in rural Malawi and evaluate differences in reported lifetime and past six-month violence, as well as respondent survey satisfaction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first experimental evidence on whether question sequencing can make data collection on intimate partner violence more survivor-centered and whether there are any data quality trade-offs.

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When many people do not trust or use formal legal systems, how can law meaningfully respond to gender-based violence? This paper uses a Human Rights Education project in rural Zambia to examine how lived practices of justice interact with, diverge from, and potentially reshape legal frameworks.

Paper long abstract

This paper applies a “Living Rights” framework (Hanson & Nieuwenhuys 2013) to an ongoing Human Rights Education (HRE) project addressing sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in rural Zambia to examine what this approach reveals about the relationship between lived experiences of justice and formal legal frameworks.

Living Rights theory conceptualizes rights as emerging from the often unstable tension between everyday moral practice and legal codification. The paper asks how this tension is articulated in contexts where courts are weak, trust in formal justice is limited, and many conflicts – particularly those involving gender and violence – can be addressed through customary or community-based mechanisms.

Undertaken with two Zambian grassroots organizations, the project examines participatory HRE as a methodological site through which this tension becomes visible. Building on previous work by Ben Cislaghi (2018) on HRE, social norm change, and gender norms, the project invites community members to reflect on entitlement, harm, and accountability in relation to SGBV. This is especially significant given the cultural taboos surrounding gender, sexuality, and violence, which often limit legal reporting and open discussion. By engaging these issues at the level of values and social norms, HRE makes visible how ideas of justice are negotiated and reworked in everyday life, within and outside the formal legal system.

Viewed through a Living Rights lens, the study examines how formal law, gender norms, and violence intersect in practice, and how gaps between legal categories and lived experience impact anti-gender backlash and democratic backsliding.

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Reaching and recruiting participants from hidden and heterogenous populations such as victim-survivors of GBV is challenging. The paper presents an approach that is trauma-aware and appears to be effective.

Paper long abstract

Conducting ethical and effective research on Gender-Based Violence (GBV) is more critical than ever. Yet traditional community-embedded recruitment methods can struggle to reach diverse participants, particularly in fragmented or digitally-mediated contexts, risking the reinforcement of knowledge gaps around the most marginalized experiences. This paper addresses this methodological challenge, arguing that the principles of relationality and trauma-aware practice must begin not at the interview, but at the point of recruitment.

Drawing on a research study on sexual violence experiences in higher education settings, this paper presents an innovative, online-first recruitment framework designed for highly sensitive topics. The approach integrates four key elements: combining passive and active outreach, providing a transparent information hub, simplifying expressions of interest, and ensuring structured, respectful communication with every potential participant. This relational framework proved highly effective, enabling the researchers to connect with a diverse sample that included individuals who had never previously disclosed their experiences of sexual violence to anyone.

For development scholars and practitioners, this methodology offers a crucial contribution to the field’s emerging directions. It offers a practical, adaptable, and resource-efficient model for reaching beyond the usual gatekeepers and service-user populations, and seeks engagements with how this might (or might not) be put into practice in diverse settings with multiple constraints. The paper seeks reflections for applying this relational framework across different development contexts, ensuring our methods evolve to meet the complex realities of the current conjuncture.

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Children born from trafficking remain largely invisible in GBV research. This study examines their vulnerabilities, identities, and futures within climate-driven mobility in Kenya, using trauma-informed, feminist, and decolonial approaches.

Paper long abstract

Children born as a result of trafficking remain among the least understood and least protected groups within gender-based violence (GBV) scholarship. While research often highlights the experiences of trafficked women and girls, far less attention is paid to children conceived through coercion, sexual exploitation, or forced relationships during trafficking journeys. This paper investigates the vulnerabilities and identities of these children in Kenya, situating their experiences within the broader dynamics of climate-induced mobility and the precarity it generates.

Drawing on trauma-informed interviews with trafficking survivors and frontline practitioners, the study examines how climate shocks intensify unsafe migration, heighten exposure to exploitation, and shape the conditions under which these children are conceived and raised. It conceptualises children born of trafficking as subjects of intergenerational and structural GBV, facing layered risks including social stigma, disrupted kinship ties, documentation barriers, and enduring psychosocial harm.

Employing a feminist and decolonial analytic lens, the paper challenges dominant survivor-centred trafficking frameworks by foregrounding the often-unseen afterlives of reproductive violence. It argues that children born of trafficking represent an urgent yet overlooked area of policy and protection, requiring integrated responses across child welfare, anti-trafficking systems, and climate adaptation strategies.

By centring African-led knowledge and lived realities, the paper reframes GBV as a phenomenon that spans generations, exposing how climate pressures, mobility disruptions, and gendered inequalities converge to produce new and enduring forms of vulnerability.

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This paper theorises Gender-Based Violence as everyday, ritualised, and morally legitimised practice. Drawing on ethnographic research on Sati (widow immolation) rituals, it shows how GBV is reproduced through social norms and political culture during periods of democratic and institutional crisis.

Paper long abstract

This paper advances a theoretically grounded understanding of Gender-Based Violence (GBV) as a continuum embedded in the everyday lives of women. Moving beyond event-based and juridical approaches, it conceptualises GBV as sustained through ritualised practices, symbolic meanings, and moral economies that render gendered harm socially legitimate.

Drawing on long-term qualitative and ethnographic research conducted in the state of Rajasthan in India, the paper examines how everyday forms of violence (such as social surveillance, honour-based regulation, symbolic humiliation, and the ritualisation of women’s suffering) operate as mechanisms through which gender inequality is normalised and reproduced. These practices are not residual cultural phenomena but are deeply entangled with caste hierarchies, political culture, and local configurations of power. In moments of socio-political uncertainty, ritualised violence functions as a stabilising normative resource, reaffirming community boundaries while disciplining gendered bodies.

The paper engages feminist theories of violence as a continuum, Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence, and scholarship on social norms and moral legitimacy to demonstrate why technocratic and legalistic GBV interventions often fail to disrupt deeply embedded structures of harm. Methodologically, it underscores the importance of ethnographic and reflexive approaches for capturing forms of violence that remain invisible to policy metrics and legal thresholds. By foregrounding the cultural infrastructures that sustain GBV, the paper argues that durable social norm change requires confronting the moral and ritual logics that sustain violence. This approach offers critical insights for building community, consensus, and justice-oriented development pathways in times of global interregnum.

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This empirical study from Bangladesh shows how hidden patriarchy restricts women’s voting agency, with electoral pressure acting as gender-based violence. Using VAW 2015 data, it links husbands’ influence, education, wealth and absence to women’s autonomy, offering new GBV–politics insights.

Paper long abstract

Women’s participation in elections is often celebrated as democratic progress, yet participation alone does not guarantee substantive political agency. Using nationally representative data from the Violence Against Women (VAW) Survey 2015, this paper examines women’s independent voting choices in Bangladesh, conceptualising intra-household electoral pressure as a subtle but significant form of gender-based violence— where coercion, intimidation, and constrained autonomy operate within intimate relationships.

Voting agency is defined as the ability to vote freely without pressure from husbands or family members. Logistic regression results show that while most married women report voting freely, 14% do not—and among these, nearly 80% cite husbands as the source of pressure. Women’s tertiary education and household wealth are positively associated with voting autonomy, but the most influential predictors concern husbands: both higher husband education and his physical absence from the household significantly increase women’s likelihood of voting freely. These patterns suggest that patriarchal control is exercised through both normative expectations and close supervision.

Anchored in feminist theories of patriarchy, intra-household bargaining, and the capability approach, the paper argues that electoral coercion forms part of a continuum of gendered control that mirrors other forms of GBV. The study demonstrates the potential of GBV surveys for analysing political agency, revealing hidden constraints on women’s citizenship.

The findings highlight the need for voter education addressing intra-household coercion, gender-sensitive electoral safeguards, and broader empowerment initiatives that strengthen women’s bargaining power. Without freedom from patriarchal control, women’s votes may be counted, but their voices remain constrained.

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This paper examines the non-technical barriers to implement the Indonesian Law on Sexual Violence Crimes of 2022, which is lauded as a progressive anti-gender-based violence legislation that expands the definition of sexual violence to include perpetrator's intention to violate the victim's dignity.

Paper long abstract

After decades of advocacy, Indonesia ratified the Law on Sexual Violence Crimes in 2022, during heightened online conversations about sexual violence against girls cases. The criminal legislation has been lauded as exceptionally comprehensive; a significant progress in addressing gender-based violence. Nonetheless, the anti-sexual violence law is said to be challenging to implement in the specific socio-cultural and historical context of Indonesia. This paper employs poststructural analysis on the Law on Sexual Violence Crimes text and interview transcripts of activists involved in its development to examine non-technical barriers of implementing the legislation.

Given the extensive criminal justice procedures written in the Law of Sexual Violence Crimes, it seems to heavily problematise the lack of evidence to prove that a sexual violence really happens, or that the incident is truly a sexual violence. The law expands representations of sexual violence, which is not only sex without consent or with unequal power relations, but also sexuality-oriented activities with intentions to degrade the victim’s dignity. Consequently, the law introduces new ways of proving sexual violence, or what counts as evidence.

Nonetheless, a policy to ‘solve’ barriers in judicial proceedings may inadvertently create other kinds of ‘problem’. In the case of the Law on Sexual Violence Crimes, reporting or exposing the sexual violence incident could be another violation of dignity. People might think that if nobody reports, then the sexual violence can be considered to not have happened, and thus, the victims’ dignity remains ‘unviolated’. How this way of thinking becomes conceivable will be discussed.

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This paper examines the effect of the introduction of islamic law in Nigeria on gender based violence. The study exploits variation in the exposure to sharia (known as islamic law) in northern states in Nigeria by using data from the Nigeria's DHS and a difference-in-differences approach.

Paper long abstract

In 1999, some northern states in Nigeria introduced sharia, also known as islamic law. Islamic law has been found to impact on women's litigant rights, which could affect other women's outcomes. This paper examines This paper examines the effect of the introduction of islamic law in Nigeria on gender based violence (intimate partner violence). In this study, we use data from Nigeria's Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for periods before and after the introduction of sharia across the northern states in Nigeria. In addition, we exploit the variation in the introduction of islamic law over time using a difference-in-differences estimation approach. The DHS data used in our analysis covered 1999, 2003, 2008 and 2013, and the outcomes variables include reported incidence of domestic violence, attitudes to domestic violence, and reporting experience of domestic violence. Moreover, we identify plausible pathways or mechanisms through which the introduction of islamic law in Nigeria affects gender based violence. The findings of the study reveals that the introduction of sharia is positively associated with the experience of gender based violence. The results of the study contributes to advancing our understanding of some of the potential drivers or causes of gender based violence in developing countries context.