Productive Violence: Identifying narratives used to legitimise abuse
Channel: War Studies KCL
Date: 2022-02-02

Dr Andrea Espinoza Carvajal,  Feminist researcher and Lecturer in International Relations and Gender Education, discusses women's experience of gender-based violence to address productive violence, defined as violence inflicted upon others for a socially acceptable reason, including providing punishment, teaching a lesson, restoring social hierarchies, and reproducing social norms in a group. 

Understanding gender-based violence as productive aims to show how complicated it is to disrupt and challenge patterns of abuse when they have been given value within society and might not be categorised as abuse but as an acceptable and desirable display of normative power.