Saeed Watto

Violence Against Women in Pakistan: a Problem in Perspectives Saeed Watto

Multiple perspectives explain causative factors of violence against women that are popularly identified as: i) radical feminism-challenging male dominance rooted in patriarchal structures of society; ii) socialist feminism-situating women?s vulnerability to male violence in their economic dependence on men; and iii) post-modern feminism-attributing violence against women to multiple causative factors. This study stands on the confluence of these multiple perspectives. Unlike single dimension approaches of radical and socialist feminism, it focused on multidimensional causation of violence against women. Presumably, perpetration of physical violence against women is necessarily a relational phenomenon and its prevalence may vary with varying types of interpersonal relations of men with women. Mainly, it focused on finding out answers to the questions: i) how do men define their relations with women; ii) how does a complex interplay of multiple factors characterize their relations with women; and iii) how do the different relations of men with women predict differential propensity of perpetrating physical violence against women in Pakistani households, both rural and urban.