Doctoral Dissertation Research: Access to Justice Among Victims of Gender-Based Violence

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This project attempts to understand the relationship between law and social change by asking how people come to view their challenges as problems needing a legal solution. It examines this question using the case of violence against women. Despite significant efforts by feminist movements to raise awareness about violence against women and anti-violence laws enacted by regional governments, violence against women is not always regarded as a significant social and legal problem. Violence against women persists at high levels around the world, and often, the legal avenues available to women in the aftermath of violence remain underutilized. This project will investigate how women understand experiences of violence, and how these understandings shape their decisions to seek legal recourse.Bangladesh offers an opportunity to advance understanding of factors that shape women's decisions to access legal solutions in the case of violence. The country has made remarkable progress in gender equality initiatives, but violence against women is pervasive and women are limited in their access to justice. Moreover, the country has several systems of state and non-state legal fora that add an additional layer of complexity to understanding how individuals conceptualize justice in the case of violence against women. This project links the sociological literatures on law, gender, inequality and globalization, and uses ethnographic fieldwork in Bangladesh in one urban and one rural region with different legal fora, as well as archival analysis, to study the perceptions of a range of actors engaged in work relating to violence against women. While interviews with women will comprise the majority of data collection, the study will also examine the perspectives of policymakers, activists, non-government organization officials and academics who help to shape anti-violence laws and policies. The project will also interview state and non-state legal authorities that women directly encounter if they initiate judicial procedures for violence. This study will contribute to scholarship on law and society by adding to knowledge of how concepts of violence against women and justice are understood, negotiated, and re-created, and the structural factors that shape women's decisions to pursue legal recourse following experiences of violence. This project has relevance for individuals, organizations, and policymakers working to combat violence against women.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.