By Rita Antoni and Júlia Lilian Szabó
Rita Antoni earned MA degrees in English Studies (with a specialization in Gender in Language and Literature) and in Philosophy at the University of Szeged. She is a women’s rights activist, leader of the Association for Women (Nőkért Egyesület), and a freelance journalist.
Júlia Lilian Szabó is a Research Assistant at CEU Democracy Institute. She holds an MA in Political Science from Central European University, and a BSc in Philosophy and Politics from the University of Bristol.
We are witnessing the worrying proliferation of exclusionary political visions across the globe. Aspiring autocrats are exchanging know-how, and it is becoming clear that gender-based violence is part of the toolkit.
At the invitation of the CEU Democracy Institute’s Inequalities and Democracy Workgroup and organizers Andrea Krizsán and Conny Roggeband, political scientists from all over the world gathered in Budapest in June for a two-day workshop to unpack how gendered violence – physical, sexual, psychological, economic and semiotic – becomes a mechanism for promoting and sustaining autocratic regimes, and how gender-based violence aids would-be autocrats in coming to power. Here are some of the most important takeaways.
Gender-based Violence as a Tool of Autocrats
As world politics in recent times has demonstrated, democracy is not irreversible: hard-won freedoms can be lost and the social consensus behind democratic values is more fragile than once hoped.
In the current political climate shaped by the spread of autocratic trends related to gender equality, including reproductive rights, rights to bodily autonomy, physical integrity, safety and a life free from gender-based violence, women and LGBTQI+ people are at particular risk.
As the organizers Krizsánand Roggeband argued, the autocratizing state uses a plethora of tactics to roll back gender equality and sexual rights. These states also abuse their legitimate monopoly on violence, a tendency that has specifically gendered aspects. Autocratic and autocratizing states often instigate violence against women and LGBTQI+ people, and grant impunity to the perpetrators of violence [it would be good if there was an example here to illustrate]. However, as Roggeband and Krizsán emphasized,
the novelty of contemporary autocratic regimes lies in their use of indirect and often elusive mechanisms to cement gendered inequalities and normalize gender-based violence. To sustain hierarchal power relations, gender-based state violence is used to punish those who threaten the unequal status quo by transgressing hegemonic gender norms.
In line with the rationale of the workshop, participants emphasized the need to move away from narrow accounts of violence as physical violence with an individualistic focus. In addition to individual acts, the fear and terror of particular groups who cannot count on the state to protect them should also be considered a form of violence. Violence may be interpersonal, but also institutional and structural. It can be physical and sexual but can also take the form of threats and intimidation. Gender-based violence cannot be treated as an individual-level phenomenon: it is embedded in an overarching patriarchal structure wherein different forms of violence mutually reinforce each other.
Forms of Violence Against Women in Different Regime Types
The autocratic or autocratizing state may use gender violence directly. However, it often only needs to create the right conditions for violence for non-state actors to follow through.
While states pass laws that lead to women’s death (e.g. Polish law on abortion), as Roggeband and Krizsán argued, they also often condone violence tacitly by failing to adopt, implement or enforce efficient policies that address it. (another example here would balance out the sentence). Besides institutional neglect, there are also a myriad informal gestures through which state actors and politicians may create a public atmosphere in which violence against women and LGBTQI+ people is accepted and can spread. Outsourcing violence to non-state actors is another standard strategy of autocratizing states.
Krizsán and Roggeband brought the example of domestic violence.
Autocratic and autocratizing states systematically fail to protect victims. They tend to reject international norms such as those laid out in the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention. If they have protective and preventive policies in place, the institutional capacity to implement them is deliberately undermined.
Autocrats eliminate accountability mechanisms as organizations with relevant experience are excluded from the policy process. Autocrats fail to publicly condemn gender-based violence and often use misogynistic language that trickles down to everyday life giving a sense of legitimacy to perpetrators and negligence to frontline workers while denying victims the sense that their safety and dignity will be assured. Furthermore, autocratic and autocratizing states delegitimize, stigmatize and harass women’s organizations that seek to protect victims of domestic violence.
As Magda Grabowska of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences explained, extremely strict abortion laws, such as the one in Poland, should be considered forced gestation and as such a form of state violence against women. Forced gestation, as she put it, is forced reproductive labor that is especially alienating. Polish women have organized against this form of exploitation and recognized that gestational work can be a site of resistance, one form of which is abortion. Women’s activism in Poland triggered an unusual degree of aggression from the state, with police officers brutally beating and pepper-spraying peaceful civil protesters and women politicians. The experience of Polish LGBTQI+ organizations has been similar. As Grabowska put it, the establishment of LGBT-free zones created a “safe space for violence”.
Janet Elise Johnson, Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, discussed the phenomenon of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) (the victims of which are typically, though not exclusively, women). In the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she argued that the impunity for domestic violence and rape in authoritarian Russia has contributed significantly to the escalation of war-related rape. In such contexts, commanders are unable or reluctant to prohibit the practice. Evidence indeed suggests that CRSV is a deliberate policy of autocratic states waging wars.
As Elin Bjanegård from Uppsala University argued,
a characteristic of contemporary autocratic regimes is that they employ the tactic of gender washing, that is, they adopt policies that seem to move forward the cause of gender equality in order to improve the country’s international reputation but then fail to live up to those standards.
This is why we see a paradoxical advancement of women’s rights in autocratic regimes:
such policies are merely an instrument to divert attention away from what are otherwise violations of democratic norms and the regular abuse of women and LGBTQI+ people.
One example of gender washing is the women’s quota in the Rwandan parliament which has been celebrated as a sign of democratization, but which are effectively reserved seats (citizens have no say in who occupies them). Another striking example is Saudi Arabia where Mohammed bin Salman has allowed women to drive cars which he advertises as a great leap towards gender equality to Western partners, while at the same time imprisoning the women’s rights activists who fought for their right to drive. Similarly, as Krizsán and Roggeband warned, the adoption of laws on violence against women, without any supportive implementation measures and accompanied by the persecution of women’s organizations that could provide protection for victims, amount to exercises in window-dressing which ultimately undermine the protection of women’s rights.
As Jennifer M. Piscopo from Royal Holloway, University of London pointed out,
a strategy pursued by left-wing autocracies is to loudly introduce progressive gender equality measures and then quietly backtrack from them.
A case in point is Bolivia where a near-total ban on abortion was lifted in 2017 only to be reintroduced in 2018. The strategy works because the rollback tends to get much less attention in the media.
As Juliana Restrepo Sanin from the University of Florida explained,
targeted political violence against female politicians as a means of discouraging women from participating in public life and taking up political office, is widespread in Latin America. These can be considered ‘message crimes’ that signal to women that they do not have a place in public life.
This form of violence can range from sexist micro-aggression through procedural harassment (e.g. being brought to trial on false corruption charges) to assassination. However, political violence against women and LGBTQI+ people, as well as civil society groups representing feminist and LGBTQI+ interests, is prevalent in most autocratizing states.
The Production of Alternative Gender Knowledge for Anti-feminist Purposes
Anti-democratic political actors in advanced democracies as well as ruling elites in autocratic and autocratizing states often employ virulent anti-gender discourse. As Mieke Verloo from Radboud University argued,
one of their aims is to delegitimize accumulated gender knowledge produced by decades of feminist activism and scholarship, and to produce alternative gender knowledge that serves anti-feminist purposes. According to Verloo, anti-feminist actors seek to create an epistemic chaos around gender. While propagating the slogan ‘no gender’, anti-feminists are actually most determined to uphold oppressive gender norms and gendered hierarchies.
This type of discourse does serious, clearly observable damage to the fight against gender-based violence. To thwart measures protecting abused women, anti-feminists often claim that “violence has no gender”. Only when it comes to migrant communities does gender-based violence receive any explicit attention from anti-feminists, so that they can attribute its perpetration exclusively to migrant men. This serves to uphold the exclusionary and oppressive image of the patriarchal white family which, as Krizsán and Roggeband emphasized, is the ideological cornerstone of illiberal autocratization. As Silvia Díaz Fernandez from the University of Madrid reported, the production of alternative knowledge about domestic violence in Spain combined with a focus on male victimhood and the re-conceptualization of domestic violence on a racist/xenophobic basis has eroded the previously existent social consensus on domestic violence in the country.
Where anti-gender parties are in power, they outsource much of the work of hate-mongering and alternative knowledge-creation to various GONGOs, think tanks, public media actors and influencers. At the same time, anti-gender actors seek to stifle feminist knowledge production.
Verloo, who analyzed the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 document (which is intended to provide a policy blueprint for the incoming Trump administration), reported that it flags the importance of ‘taking back’ educational institutions and thus ‘reinstating parental authority over children’. The document also projects that the next step in the strategy of anti-gender forces is ‘gender cleansing,’ that is the removal of the terms gender and gender equality (but also abortion, reproductive rights, diversity, equity and inclusion) from federal grants, policy documents and legislation.
The anti-gender movement aims for hegemony but, as Elena Pavan from the University of Trento pointed out, it may not be as unified as it seems. The anti-gender movement is rather a broad coalition with different actors seeking to integrate their ideas and agendas into the movement’s rhetoric and strategy, she emphasized. Pavan’s team of network scientists analyzed the micro-foundations of the anti-gender discourse on Italian social media. They concluded that what currently looks like a recent successful cycle of mobilization of a coalition of force (that has also attracted actors with anti-trans feminist agendas), is one that may soon fracture along ideological fault lines.
Participants of the workshop adopted diverse viewpoints about whether internal splits could pose a serious challenge to the spread of anti-gender discourse. What they all agreed on is that the normalization of violence through increasingly sophisticated means will pose a growing challenge to feminists and defenders of democratic values around the world.
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The workshop was co-sponsored by the CCINDLE project. The link between gender-based violence and democratic erosion is one of the key topics to be tackled by CCINDLE in the next two years.
