Gender Inequality And Violence Against Women

This essay will explore inequality in the form of gender inequality and how it relates to male violence against women. Male violence against women is very prevalent in western countries: in New Zealand the most common way it takes shape is domestic violence. The New Zealand Ministry of Health shows that in 2006, out of the people who went to a hospital for a domestic abuse injury in New Zealand, 91% were women (Collins, 2012). Violence against women can be explored through theory, and the theories that are going to be applied in this paper to gender inequality and violence against women are Radical Feminism and Intersectionality. This essay will explore how both theories illuminate the gender inequality of violence against women and how they …show more content…
Collins, 2012, describes domestic violence as someone having control over others through threats and intimidation, limiting a person’s ability to act freely and resulting in physical or psychological harm. Domestic violence in New Zealand has a gender bias against women, and on top of that, it has an ethnicity bias, in 2007, 42% of women using Women’s Refugee were Māori (Collins, 2012). In New Zealand, women have achieved and created more economic equality; however, there are still gender role stereotypes and cultural ideas about men being more dominant and being the stronger or better gender (Collins, 2012). These ideas lead to domestic violence and other things that feed into violence against women such as victim blame (when the male perpetrator is not a stranger to the woman) and the idea that the woman should be the oneto make a relationship work (Collins, …show more content…
Feminism consisted primarily of the views of white, middle class women and it didn’t consider other forms of oppression. This theory was intended to show the struggles and experiences of black women who experience gender and race inequality (Davis, 2008). Intersectionality argues that forms of inequality (such as race, class, gender, and disability) cannot be understood individually and that they all intersect with each other and create different power relationships and experiences for people that come under these categories (Collins & Chepp, 2013).Intersectionality also consider identities: it looks at the micro or individual level to see how people’s identities are shaped by forms of oppression such as gender. It also explores the macro or societal level of how different types of inequality manifest in social