Gender Equality and Violence Against Women. Understanding the So-called Nordic Paradox

• Main Author: Grzyb, Magdalena
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: Polish
• Published: Polska Akademia Nauk. Instytut Nauk Prawnych PAN 2018
• Subjects: genre; socio; Norway; Iceland
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.7420/AK2018E; https://bibliotekanauki.pl/articles/698786.pdf; https://bibliotekanauki.pl/articles/698786

According to the prevailing assumption, the main cause of violence against women isa structural inequality between men and women. That idea is common in internationalhuman rights discourse, widely accepted on political level and enforced by severalscientific studies. The structural nature of violence against women means that it isgender-based violence and one of the crucial social mechanisms by which womenare forced into a subordinate position compared with men. It is a manifestationof historically unequal power relations between men and women which have led todomination over, and discrimination against, women by men, and have prevented fulladvancement of women.Logically thinking, achieving gender equality would lead to the elimination ofviolence against women. Respectively, in societies with greater gender equality, wherewomen enjoy better rights, have a better footing towards men, greater legal protectionand access to power, they also should be less vulnerable to violence based on theirgender. The most gender-equal countries in the world are Scandinavian countries –Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark and Finland.Yet, the recent EU-wide victimisation survey on violence against women (FundamentalRights Agency 2014) produced startling results. It turned out that the highestrates of violence against women (in almost every single aspect, intimate partner violenceand non-partner violence) were reported in the Nordic countries, particularly in Sweden,whereas countries considered traditional and conservative, e.g. the Mediterraneancountries or Poland, revealed a lower prevalence of violence against women. The FRAresults on Scandinavian countries were coined the “Nordic paradox”.The main problem is this: is really gender equality a factor reducing or increasingthe likelihood of violence against women’s victimisation? Is the subordinate positionof women typical of more conservative societies a protective factor against violenceagainst women? And are actually the FRA study results sufficiently reliable to drawsuch ...