The Role of Violence in Enforcing Ethnic and Gender Hierarchies

Violence is not always a fist or a weapon. Sometimes it is a slur in a classroom, a hiring panel that quietly rejects a name, or a wartime act that uses a woman’s body to humiliate an entire community. To understand how ethnic and gender hierarchies are maintained, we have to look at violence in both forms: the physical acts that terrorise bodies, and the symbolic acts that wear down dignity over generations. Both work together, and both serve the same purpose: keeping certain groups on top and others firmly below.

Women’s bodies as sites of power 🔗

Across history, dominant groups have used violence against women to send a message to entire communities. The target is not just the individual woman but the family, caste, ethnic group, or nation she belongs to. This is why sexual violence so often spikes during riots, wars, and caste conflicts. It is a tool of control disguised as a personal crime.

Feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller laid the foundation for this analysis in her 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. She argued that rape is “a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear”. Her work shifted the conversation away from rape as a private act of lust and reframed it as a political instrument of power.

Rape as a tactic of war 🔗

Brownmiller’s most influential contribution was her documentation of rape as a deliberate tactic in war and political conflict, used to humiliate and degrade not just individual victims but the entire community they represent. Conquering armies have historically treated women’s bodies as territory to be claimed. The Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security notes that rape has been viewed for thousands of years as an acceptable “spoil of war,” used as a weapon by invading armies to crush the will of the conquered.

The pattern has repeated itself in modern history. During the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, mass sexual violence was systematically deployed against Bengali women. The genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s repeated the same horror. In each case, the violence was not random; it was strategic, aimed at terrorising and “polluting” an entire ethnic or religious group through their women.

Colonial violence and the controlled body 🔗

Brownmiller also extended her analysis to slavery and colonisation. She argued that rape under slavery was not incidental but institutional, part of the white slaveholder’s project of economic and psychological subjugation. Enslaved women’s reproductive systems were controlled to ensure a continuous supply of slave labour, and after the 1807 ban on the African slave trade, “breeding” became an organised economic activity.

Colonial India saw a different but related pattern. British rulers used stereotypes of Indian women as “passive” and Indian men as “effeminate” to justify their rule, while simultaneously exploiting women from poorer and lower-caste communities. The bodies of colonised women became contested ground where empire, patriarchy, and caste met.

Caste, gender and sexual violence in India 🔗

The same dynamic operates within India today through the lens of caste. Sexual violence is routinely used by dominant caste groups to “discipline” Dalit and Adivasi women who step out of line. According to National Crime Records Bureau data, India reported 32,033 rape cases in 2019, with 11 percent from the Dalit community, and the conviction rate for rape cases against Dalits stood at just 32 percent.

National Family Health Survey data confirms the intersection. Sexual violence rates are highest among women from Scheduled Tribes at 7.8 percent and Scheduled Castes at 7.3 percent, compared with 4.5 percent for women not marginalised by caste or tribe. The Hathras case of 2020 became a national symbol of how caste hierarchy can turn a young woman’s body into a battleground, and how the state machinery often fails her even after death.

A factsheet by the All India Dalit Mahila Adhikar Manch shows the trend is worsening. Incidents of rape against Dalit women and minor girls rose by 89.9 percent between 2014 and 2022, with a total of 27,719 cases reported across those nine years. This is not a string of unrelated crimes; it is a pattern that enforces caste boundaries through the bodies of women.

Symbolic violence: the slow grind of stereotypes 🔗

Physical violence grabs headlines. Symbolic violence rarely does, because it is woven into everyday life. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu introduced the term to describe how power is maintained through cultural means rather than force.

Bourdieu defined symbolic violence as a non-physical form of violence exercised through cognition, communication, and knowledge, where the dominated often participate unconsciously in their own domination. It does not need a weapon. It works through textbooks, jokes, news headlines, hiring patterns, and the small daily assumptions about who belongs where.

Stereotypes that limit lives 🔗

Stereotypes are the engine of symbolic violence. They sort people into boxes before they walk into a room. A Dalit student is assumed to be a “quota candidate” rather than a meritorious scholar. A North-East Indian woman is exoticised or assumed to be from a “different” country. A Muslim job applicant’s CV is read with suspicion. None of these acts involves a punch, but each one closes a door.

Media is a powerful channel for this. Coverage that disproportionately highlights crimes by minority communities while underreporting their achievements reinforces the idea that they are inherently dangerous or deficient. Advertising compounds the damage by glorifying fair skin and slim bodies, telling women across the country that their natural appearance is a problem to be solved.

Symbolic violence in academia and the workplace 🔗

Universities and workplaces are supposed to reward talent, but symbolic violence quietly shapes who gets ahead. A Dalit research scholar may be told their English is “not good enough,” even when their ideas are original. Women in male-dominated fields may be talked over in meetings, their suggestions repeated by men and credited to them. Adivasi students often face the assumption that their culture is “backward” rather than rich and complex.

The suicide of Rohith Vemula at the University of Hyderabad in 2016 became a turning point in public conversation about institutional caste discrimination in Indian higher education. His death was not from physical violence, but from years of accumulated symbolic violence that questioned his worth as a student, a scholar, and a person.

Global examples of systemic oppression 🔗

The interlock of physical and symbolic violence is not unique to one country. It is a global pattern visible wherever ethnic minorities live within dominant majorities.

Race, health and the Afro-Brazilian experience 🔗

Anthropologist Kia Lilly Caldwell’s work on Brazil offers a striking parallel to the Indian experience. Brazil is home to the world’s second-largest African-descendant population, yet has long failed to address public health issues that disproportionately impact Afro-Brazilian women and men. Caldwell’s research documents how race, gender, and class combine to produce poor health outcomes.

One case she discusses is that of Alyne da Silva Pimentel, a 28-year-old Afro-Brazilian woman who died in 2002 after receiving inadequate maternity care. Her death exposed the “gross inadequacies and failures in the quality of maternity care and emergency obstetric care provided to poor, African-descendant women in Brazil”. The case was eventually heard by a United Nations committee, marking the first time an international human rights body held a state accountable for a maternal death.

Caldwell’s broader argument is that Afro-Brazilian children grow up in a society where policies designed for “women’s health” or “black population health” rarely speak to each other, leaving Black women and their children stranded between the two. From school textbooks that whiten national heroes to clinics that dismiss Black women’s pain, symbolic violence shapes life chances from birth.

Education, employment and healthcare worldwide 🔗

In the United States, decades of research show that Black students are more likely to be punished for the same behaviour as white students, that resumes with “Black-sounding” names receive fewer callbacks, and that Black women face higher maternal mortality regardless of income. In Canada, the “model minority” discourse about Chinese youth, which depicts them as educationally successful while politically obedient, often hides the racial discrimination they experience in everyday life.

Indigenous communities across the Americas and Australia face symbolic violence through the erasure of their languages and histories from school curricula, while simultaneously enduring physical violence through police encounters and land dispossession. The pattern is consistent: dominant groups use cultural tools to define minorities as “less than,” and then use physical tools when those minorities resist.

Why the two forms of violence cannot be separated 🔗

It is tempting to see symbolic violence as the “softer” cousin of physical violence, but Bourdieu insisted they are deeply linked. Stereotypes prepare the ground. Once a community has been defined as criminal, impure, or backward in everyday talk, physical violence against them becomes easier to justify and harder to punish.

The reverse is also true. Each act of physical violence that goes unpunished reinforces the symbolic message that some lives matter less. Low conviction rates in caste-based rape cases, the dismissal of police complaints from North-East Indian women in metropolitan cities, the way migrant workers were treated during the pandemic, all of these send signals about who counts as fully human in the eyes of the state.

Breaking this cycle requires action on both fronts. Stronger laws and faster justice address the physical violence. Changing curricula, media representation, hiring practices, and everyday language addresses the symbolic violence. Neither alone is enough.

What do you think? Where have you noticed symbolic violence operating in your own school, college, or workplace, and what would it take to interrupt it? Can a society reduce physical violence against marginalised groups without first dismantling the stereotypes that justify it?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Brownmiller
2. https://time.com/4062637/against-our-will-40/
3. https://giwps.georgetown.edu/resource/against-our-will-men-women-and-rape/
4. https://thediplomat.com/2021/08/sexual-violence-against-indias-most-vulnerable/
5. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/8/india-why-justice-eludes-many-dalit-survivors-of-sexual-violence
6. https://idsn.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/AIDMAM-Factsheet-2024-Violence-again-women-Factsheet.pdf
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_violence
8. https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p082474
9. https://www.academia.edu/85386346/Health_Equity_in_Brazil_Intersections_of_Gender_Race_and_Policy_Kia_Lilly_Caldwell_Champaign_University_of_Illinois_Press_2017_216_pp
10. https://www.aaihs.org/intersectional-health-equity-in-brazil-an-interview-with-kia-lilly-caldwell/
11. https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/cjs/index.php/CJS/article/download/29597/21484/78739