Root Causes of Gender-Based Violence: CSS 2025 Solved Answer

Exam question: CSS 2025: What are the root causes that lead to gender-based violence? How do these factors interact and perpetuate violence against women in Pakistan?

Syllabus area: Section VIII: Gender-Based Violence of CSS Gender Studies.

Short answer

Outline for quick revision

Introduction and definition of Gender-Based Violence
The foundation of all root causes: the power imbalance
The five root causes (the five theories of violence)
The supporting causes: how society constructs the violent role
How the factors interact and perpetuate violence in Pakistan (the cycle)
Breaking the cycle
Conclusion

1. Introduction and Definition

Gender-Based Violence is violence that is directed against a person on the basis of gender. The UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (DEVAW) defines it as “any act of gender-based violence that results in physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion, or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life.” The scale in Pakistan demands a causal explanation rather than a moral one: 1 in 3 women worldwide face gender-based violence in their lifetime, the Aurat Foundation estimates that a large majority of Pakistani women face domestic violence, and approximately 12 women are raped daily in Pakistan regardless of class or education. Numbers of this scale cannot be produced by individual bad men; they are produced by root causes built into the society itself, and this answer identifies those causes and shows how they interlock.

2. The Foundation of All Root Causes: the Power Imbalance

Before the individual theories, the foundation must be stated as a paragraph, because every theory below is an expression of it. Power is the ability to control, access and dominate decision-making processes, and an invisible power structure exists between the genders: the masculine gender holds power and misuses it against the feminine gender. The proof that violence flows from power and not from anger is the observation: a man never slaps his female boss, because she has power over him, but he beats his wife at home, because in his mental power structure she is powerless and has nowhere to go. Gender-based violence, at its root, is the maintenance of this power structure by force.

3. The Five Root Causes (the Five Theories of Violence)

(a) Social Learning Theory: violence is learned at home

Violence is a socially learned behavior: a boy who watches his father, brother or uncle beat their wives learns that “beating a woman is not such a bad thing.”
The child does not decide to become an abuser; his psyche records in childhood what a man does, and the recording plays back in his own marriage decades later.
This is the same mechanism Psychoanalytical feminism describes with its stance, gender exploitation is rooted in the psyche and transmitted unconsciously through language.

(b) Operant Conditioning: violence is rewarded and used to punish

Violence is committed to gain a reward, meaning control, “so my wife never speaks against me,” “so my partner never leaves me.”
Violence is equally committed to administer punishment, “she refused me, so I will punish her.”
Because the violence reliably delivers its reward and the punishment reliably lands without consequence, the behavior is reinforced every time it is used.

(c) Family Power / Resource Theory: violence maintains household power

Violence occurs in the family in order to maintain power: the man uses force to keep all resources and decision-making authority, money, mobility, the children’s schooling, with himself.
Until this powerful position of men inside the household is challenged, the violence that guards it continues.

(d) Sociobiological / Neo-Darwinism Theory: aggression evolved to keep dominance

Male aggressive tendencies evolved over centuries so that men keep the resourceful, dominant, decision-making role and keep women subordinate.
This is not a one-day story but centuries of evolution in the service of maintaining resources, which is why the tendency feels “natural” to its carriers even though its targets are chosen socially.

(e) Male Peer Support Theory: violence is applauded by other men

Men support violent men: friends applaud a man for “keeping his wife in line,” and officials side with male criminals.
The standing Pakistani example is the Motorway rape case, in which the CCPO responded to a gang rape by blaming the victim, asking why she was out at that time, which is institutional male peer support broadcast on television.
The hopeful corollary must be stated too: if male peer support ends, and only men can end it, a huge change becomes possible.

4. The Supporting Causes: How Society Constructs the Violent Role

(a) Culture

Culture assigns the man privilege and the woman endurance, and it labels the violence between them “a family matter,” which places it beyond accountability.
Cultural devices such as dowry, honor codes and the jirga turn women into property and their bodies into the currency of settlement, the Mukhtaran Mai case (2002), in which a panchayat ordered a gang rape as “settlement,” is the standing proof.

(b) Media

Media normalizes the violence it should expose: dramas reward the silently enduring wife and vilify the woman who resists, which is precisely the narrative territory of the Postmodern school that deconstructs the narratives society builds.
Popular culture idealizes toxic masculinity: the Kabir Singh model in which drinking, aggression and beating are romanticized as love, so the next generation learns violence as heroism.

(c) Language

Language carries the classification of women as inferior from one generation’s unconscious to the next, through proverbs, jokes and everyday praise of the man who “keeps his wife in line.”
A society that speaks of a raped woman’s “lost honor” has, in its very grammar, shifted the crime from the criminal to the victim.

(d) Economic dependence

A woman without her own income has no exit, and a victim with no exit is a victim who stays.
The economic frame is the Marxist stance, the man exploits the woman as capital exploits labor, and its Pakistani evidence is fixed: the ILO ranks Pakistan #1 in the world for the gender pay gap.

5. How the Factors Interact and Perpetuate Violence in Pakistan (the Cycle)

(This section answers the question’s second demand directly, the causes do not operate separately; they form a self-feeding cycle, and each stage should be written as one link.)

Link 1: Power sets the stage. The invisible power structure defines the woman as inferior and the man as entitled to control her.
Link 2: Social learning installs the behavior. The son watches the father and inherits the entitlement as a recorded behavior, so each generation is trained by the last.
Link 3: Rewards reinforce it. Every act of violence that successfully delivers control, and every refusal successfully punished, conditions the man to repeat it.
Link 4: The family structure demands it. Because the household’s resources and decisions are his to guard, violence becomes the maintenance tool of daily life.
Link 5: Male peers legitimize it. Friends applaud, officials blame the victim, and the jirga formalizes it, so the violent man hears approval from every direction.
Link 6: The structure protects it. The judiciary grants bail, the police discourage the complaint, and the state answers with committees, this is structural violence: invisible, depersonalized, with no clear perpetrator, built into structures of society which show unequal power and unequal life chances.
Link 7: Silence completes the loop. Only about ten percent of cases against women are ever reported, the unpunished act becomes the next boy’s lesson, and the cycle returns to Link 2 stronger than before.
The perpetuation, stated in one sentence: each factor covers for the next, the home trains the man, the peers excuse him, the institutions protect him, and the silence erases the evidence, which is why removing any single factor alone has never ended the violence.

6. Breaking the Cycle

The cycle must be attacked at its weakest links rather than everywhere at once.
Certainty of punishment breaks Link 6, because a protected structure that begins convicting stops protecting, and the rule applies: never write public hanging; the real deterrent is certainty of punishment.
Education and awareness break Link 2, because the boy who is made aware of what was installed in him is the first man in his line who does not repeat it.
The end of male peer support breaks Link 5, and it is the one repair only men can perform.
Economic empowerment breaks the dependence that holds victims inside the cycle, and breaking the silence, safe, shameless reporting, starves the cycle of the impunity it feeds on.

7. Conclusion

The root causes of gender-based violence are not mysteries; they are five well-mapped mechanisms, social learning, operant conditioning, family power, evolved male aggression and male peer support, all standing on one foundation, the gendered power imbalance, and all supplied by culture, media, language and economic dependence. In Pakistan these causes do not merely coexist; they interact as a closed cycle in which the home trains the violent man, the peers excuse him, the institutions protect him and the silence erases him. Violence against women will persist for exactly as long as that cycle stays closed, and it will begin to end on the day any of its links is broken deliberately: a certain punishment, an aware son, a friend who refuses to applaud.

References

UN DEVAW, the definition of gender-based violence (quoted verbatim).
Aurat Foundation, domestic-violence estimates for Pakistan (hedge exact figures).
ILO, Pakistan ranks #1 in the world for the gender pay gap (economic-dependence cause).

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Last updated: 2 November 2026.

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