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Violence against women (VAW) remains a global crisis, with one in three women subjected to physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. Although VAW is pervasive and universal, manifestations, forms, and understanding of violence vary according to the local context. While there is robust literature documenting the prevalence of VAW globally, evidence on how local socio-economic and cultural structures contribute to various manifestations of VAW is still emerging. In this dissertation, I examine how experiences of VAW are embedded in local socio-cultural structures in three rural communities in Nepal, including how VAW intersects with caste and how women employ different forms of agency and resistance in response to violence. I explore these questions using semi-structured interviews with 59 women practicing Chhaupadi, a cultural practice in which women temporarily segregate in huts during menstruation. In addition to women participants, I also interviewed 14 stakeholders, including safehouse officers, nurses, and counselors. I conducted the study during the summers of 2022 and 2023. Drawing on Scheper-Hughes, Bourgois, and Galtung’s theorizations of structural and symbolic violence, I examine different forms of VAW and document local institutional and social mechanisms through which VAW operates. I find that the normalization of violence occurs through interlocking systems of women’s material dependency on perpetrators and social indifference to women’s physical and emotional suffering. Specifically, a patriarchal household structure that normalizes mothers-in-law violence against daughters-in-law, patrilocality, and patriarchal inheritance leads to women’s financial dependency on men, making it harder for women to exit violent situations. The rhetoric and push for family ‘reconciliation’ after violent episodes, taken up by police, courts, and judicial committees, pushes women into a cycle of repeat violence. Dalit women are in multiple jeopardy of violence. They face compounded vulnerabilities from multiple intersecting constraints, such as limited access to land and housing, social norms that stigmatize widowhood, caste-based discrimination, and gender norms that restrict their mobility.
Drawing on feminist resistance theories, I argue that agency manifests in diverse ways based on support available to women to express and enact their resistance to violence. To support this argument, I document a range of women’s resistance strategies against gender-based family violence, Chhaupadi, and caste-based violence. While women show agency against family violence by indicating their desire to leave their violent household and strategically using their networks to do so, this form of agency is discrete, isolated, and more focused on coping with violence than contesting against VAW. In contrast, women’s contestations against caste-based violence and Chhaupadiare more explicit and direct, which I argue are due to long-term activism and mass uprisings at the community level. Similarly, in the case of Chhaupadi, such contestation are bolstered by NGO-supported activism. By contrast, no such support exists in the case of family-based VAW.