BOOK PROJECT

State of Harm: How Public Policies Create Private Violence

Typically, gender equality and economic development are thought to go hand in hand. A wealth of cross-national evidence shows that economic development has a powerful, transformative, and profoundly positive effect on the social, economic and political circumstances of women. And nowhere is this relationship more apparent than in Europe where the advanced industrialized states of the European Union consistently and systematically score highly across all indicators commonly associated with gender equality.

However, despite these advances in gender equality, Europe has a hitherto unheeded problem – its astronomical rates of violence against women, particularly by intimate partners. In defiance of assumptions about the positive correlation between development and gender equality in general, recent survey research shows that within Europe, the wealthiest countries are also the countries where everyday violence against women (EVAW) is most prevalent. This book manuscript provides a political explanation for this disturbing and puzzling relationship.

The central argument of the book is that variation in levels of VAW can be partially attributed to the state’s implementation and promotion of the “universal breadwinning model” which includes policies as paid parental leave, publicly-funded daycare services, and home-carer allowances. While these policies help increase female economic independence, they also precipitate the unraveling of traditional gender roles, which then provokes a violent male backlash against their partners.