State Politics and Violence Against Women: Sociopolitical Factors of Influence, Intervention, and Prevention

Abstract

The article deals with the impact that state policies and violence have on gender relations. Worldwide, a high degree of politicization and de-legitimization of violence against women in families and intimate relationships has meanwhile been accomplished. What is still missing, however, is theoretical and empirical research on the concrete correlation between state policies and violence, on the one hand, and gender relations on the other. The article refers to the findings of the first empirical study on that topic conducted in East Germany before and after the collapse of the former GDR. The analysis includes the relation between structural and individual violence as well as the impact of explicit and implicit social and cultural norms, policies of state intervention, gender specific role expectations, and power discrepancies between women and men. The article describes the productive social and political approaches to causal analysis and violence prevention discovered by the East German study. It calls for more integration of the—now very differentiated—areas of research on violence and prevention of everyday violence.