Violence Against Women in Politics

The concept of violence against women in politics (VAWIP) has been central to the analysis of violence against women politicians participating in formal political institutions like parliaments, regional assemblies, and political parties (Albaine Reference Albaine2015; Fabris Reference Fabris, De Souza Lima, Quezada and Roth2024; Krook Reference Krook2020). It emerged from the experiences of women politicians in Bolivia as they reflected on the experiences of hostility and violence they faced when entering the political arena and institutions. VAWIP has become a key concept for critically analyzing the conditions women face in politics in Latin America and the rest of the world (Albaine Reference Albaine2018; Egido Reference Egido2024; Townsend-Bell and Restrepo Sanín Reference Townsend-Bell, Sanín, Siim and Stoltz2024; Zamfir Reference Zamfir2024).

Scholars argue that VAWIP emerges in response to women’s political participation and presence in political spaces. It targets them for challenging male dominance by exercising political power or accessing traditionally male roles. The concept highlights how the political sphere produces violence that affects women and men differently, with discrimination, harassment, and gender-based violence hindering women’s political trajectories (Egido Reference Egido2024; Håkansson Reference Håkansson2024b; Krook and Restrepo Sanín Reference Krook and Sanín2016; Townsend-Bell and Restrepo Sanín Reference Townsend-Bell, Sanín, Siim and Stoltz2024). Research has documented these dynamics across a wide range of contexts, including Germany (Mügge and Özvatan Reference Mügge and Özvatan2025), Finland (Meriläinen Reference Meriläinen2025), Italy (Daniele, Dipoppa, and Pulejo Reference Daniele, Dipoppa and Pulejo2023; Esposito Reference Esposito2023), Jamaica (Johnson-Myers Reference Johnson-Myers2023), Japan (Fuchs and Schäfer Reference Fuchs and Schäfer2021), Sri Lanka (Bjarnegård, Håkansson, and Zetterberg Reference Bjarnegård, Håkansson and Zetterberg2022), Sweden (Erikson, Håkansson, and Josefsson Reference Erikson, Håkansson and Josefsson2023; Håkansson Reference Håkansson2021; Reference Håkansson2024a), the United Kingdom (Akhtar, Jenichen, and Intezar Reference Akhtar, Jenichen and Intezar2024; Esposito and Breeze Reference Esposito and Breeze2022; Kuperberg Reference Kuperberg2021), and the United States (Håkansson Reference Håkansson2024a).

Violence Against Women Activists

At the same time, a parallel body of scholarship has examined gendered violence against women activists, women human rights defenders, and feminist advocates operating outside formal political institutions (Alam Reference Alam2021; Arik et al. Reference Arik, Çağatay, Liinason and Sasunkevich2023; Blais Reference Blais2025; Rivera, Tappe Ortiz, and Koos Reference Rivera, Ortiz and Koos2025; Soto and Sánchez Reference Soto and Sánchez2019). Some scholars have framed this violence against activists as an issue that can be understood through the lens of VAWIP. One example is Alam (Reference Alam2021), who uses this framework to analyze violence against women activists during the Aurat March in Pakistan, where hostile responses sought to silence and delegitimize women’s political voices. Research has also pointed out that such violence can have broader political consequences, including deterring women’s political participation, reducing their candidacies, and weakening support for feminist agendas in electoral processes (Rivera, Tappe Ortiz, and Koos Reference Rivera, Ortiz and Koos2025). Bringing violence against women activists into the VAWIP framework is a crucial step for advancing the field.

Anti-Gender and Anti-Feminist Attacks

At the same time, placing violence against activists within a broader political context reveals that such violence can also have an ideological dimension, with feminist actors being particularly targeted. This is especially true in a broader contemporary context marked by the rise of anti-gender and anti-feminist mobilizations, alongside growing trends toward democratic backsliding. As scholarship shows, anti-gender mobilizations are a structured political project with transnational reach, not limited to opposing feminism, but extending to the rearticulation of democratic norms and institutions (Korolczuk, Graff, and Kantola Reference Korolczuk, Graff and Kantola2025).

Although their content and coalitions vary across contexts, anti-gender movements converge around the defense of patriarchal, cisheteronormative, and racialized social orders, using gender as a discursive hinge across religion, nationalism, welfare politics, and democratic erosion (Holzberg Reference Holzberg, Holvikivi, Holzberg and Ojeda2024; Indelicato and Magalhães Lopes Reference Indelicato and Lopes2024; Kováts and Põim Reference Kováts and Põim2015). Anti-gender actors pursue this project both within and beyond institutional arenas. They have entered state institutions, jeopardized feminist agendas, and attacked feminist representatives (Caravantes, Elizondo, and Lombardo Reference Caravantes, Elizondo and Lombardo2025; Kantola and Lombardo Reference Kantola and Lombardo2024; Lombardo Reference Lombardo2024; Lombardo, Caravantes, and Díaz Fernández Reference Lombardo, Caravantes and Fernández2025; Verge Reference Verge2025). They operate through multiple mechanisms, including hate speech, litigation, funding channels, state capture, gender-washing, femonationalism, and appeals to sovereignty against supranational institutions such as the European Union (Korolczuk, Graff, and Kantola Reference Korolczuk, Graff and Kantola2025). They have forged “opportunistic synergies” (Graff and Korolczuk Reference Graff and Korolczuk2021) by aligning with far-right parties and movements in ways that help circulate anti-gender narratives and gain access to institutional power (Goetz and Mayer Reference Goetz, Mayer, Goetz and Mayer2023).

These dynamics are often embedded in broader authoritarian and illiberal projects that utilize patriarchal governance, intimidation, and legal mechanisms to undermine dissent and restructure civil society (Arguedas-Ramírez Reference Arguedas-Ramírez, Goetz and Mayer2023; Biroli and Rousseau Reference Biroli and Rousseau2025; Neumann Reference Neumann2024). Such projects erode liberal-democratic norms not only through direct institutional attacks but also through cumulative discourses and practices that silence, intimidate, and exclude feminist and other progressive voices (Biroli and Caminotti Reference Biroli and Caminotti2020; Karlberg, Korolczuk, and Sältenberg Reference Karlberg, Korolczuk and Sältenberg2025; Weeks et al. Reference Weeks, Caravantes, Espírito-Santo, Lombardo, Stratigaki and Gul2025). Anti-gender politics should therefore be understood not simply as opposition to feminism, but as part of broader processes of democratic retrenchment (Graff and Korolczuk Reference Graff and Korolczuk2021; Kuhar and Paternotte Reference Kuhar and Paternotte2018; Lombardo Reference Lombardo2024; Verloo and Paternotte Reference Verloo and Paternotte2018).

Recent scholarship has begun to examine how feminist actors within political institutions (primarily women in politics) resist the rise of anti-gender actors and other regressive forces (Caravantes, Elizondo, and Lombardo Reference Caravantes, Elizondo and Lombardo2025; Kantola and Lombardo Reference Kantola and Lombardo2024; Lombardo, Caravantes, and Díaz Fernández Reference Lombardo, Caravantes and Fernández2025; Verge Reference Verge2025). This work widens the focus by attending not only to attacks against women in politics, but also to the targeting of those defending specific political projects such as feminism. Emerging evidence shows that feminist advocates, including activists and practitioners outside formal institutions, are clear targets of violence across different contexts (Beeson Reference Beeson, Goetz and Mayer2023; RESIST Project Team Reference Kiening, Blidon, Rodó-Zárate, Freude, Akyüz, Browne, Boulila, Carastathis, Colussi, Cömert, Diakoumakou, Filep, Hennessy, Kania, Kulpa and Tsilimpounidi2024; Roggeband and Krizsán Reference Roggeband and Krizsán2024; Wiedlack and Zabolotny Reference Wiedlack, Zabolotny, Goetz and Mayer2023). What appears to characterize this violence is not only that it cuts across institutional and noninstitutional arenas, but also that the anti-gender political project plays a constitutive role in shaping it.

This particular violence operates against not only individuals but also the infrastructures, solidarities, and organizational ecologies through which feminist politics are sustained. Existing research maps how these attacks may mobilize state resources, such as police intervention, funding withdrawal, stigmatizing legal measures, and the redirection of public resources toward ultra-conservative actors to undermine feminist and equality-oriented organizations while framing them as ideological threats (Graff and Korolczuk Reference Graff and Korolczuk2021). These attacks are not limited to elected women but extend to feminist actors and feminist infrastructures more broadly, such as women’s organizations, shelters, victim-support centers, equality bodies, human rights NGOs, and LGBTIQ+ networks (Roggeband and Krizsán Reference Roggeband and Krizsán2024).

One example is highlighted in work we have conducted with our colleagues in the RESIST project on feminist and LGBTIQ+ activists’ experiences with anti-gender actors in Belarus, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Poland, Spain, and Switzerland, as well as among people living in exile in Europe (RESIST Project Team Reference Kiening, Blidon, Rodó-Zárate, Freude, Akyüz, Browne, Boulila, Carastathis, Colussi, Cömert, Diakoumakou, Filep, Hennessy, Kania, Kulpa and Tsilimpounidi2024). The research has documented a wide range of attacks against activists, including physical and verbal assaults, coordinated online harassment, disruption of public events, vandalism, and institutional discrimination across public and intimate spaces, social media, workplaces, and state institutions.

For instance, in the Spanish case study, participants described episodes in which posting feminist content on social media triggered severe online abuse, with users responding with insults, threats, and degrading messages. In some cases, this harassment involved the repeated circulation of violent imagery and unsolicited sexual content. In other cases, highly visible feminist public figures disclosed situations in which their personal information, including home addresses and phone numbers, was deliberately published online, exposing them to further harassment and threats. Participants also described unauthorized intrusions into feminist association offices and workplaces as a form of intimidation. In other cases, they reported boycotts of feminist policy events, intimidation in parliamentary and international political spaces, and threatening confrontations in everyday public spaces over feminist opinion pieces in newspapers (Rodó-Zárate and Freude Reference Rodó-Zárate and Freude2024).

Violence Against Feminist Advocates

Bringing the three literatures on VAWIP, violence against activists, and anti-gender and anti-feminist attacks into dialogue with one another, we propose the complementary concept of violence against feminist advocates (VAFA). We argue that contemporary attacks against feminist advocates are not adequately captured if we understand them only as violence against women or only as consequences of anti-gender politics. Rather, what increasingly stands out is that these actors are targeted because they sustain and advance feminism as a political project. Following Verloo’s (Reference Verloo2018) definition of feminism as a political project oriented toward transforming gendered power relations, institutional hierarchies, and broader structures of inequality, violence against feminist advocates is not only directed at women as individuals but at those actors who embody and defend egalitarian, anti-patriarchal, and often anti-racist and queer-inclusive agendas. By shifting the analytical focus toward feminist advocates, VAFA allows us to connect gendered forms of violence with the political projects they seek to contest.

VAFA unfolds across multiple and interconnected spheres of social and political life, within political institutions and informal spaces of participation, across public and private spheres, and through both online and offline environments — taking different forms in each while remaining interconnected. Extending beyond individuals to target organizations, movements, and the broader infrastructures through which feminist politics is sustained, VAFA operates not only at the level of individual actors but also at the collective level, affecting the conditions that make feminist organizing possible.

Thus, the objective of VAFA is not only to discipline or exclude particular actors but to curtail feminist advocacy itself, silencing those who defend feminist agendas and constraining their capacity to sustain feminist political projects. As feminists abandon public platforms, reduce their visibility, or withdraw from feminist initiatives, including academic and institutional programs, the infrastructures, solidarities, and organizational capacities of feminist politics are undermined, eroding feminists’ collective capacities for advocacy, mobilization, and political intervention. Given feminism’s role in expanding democratic participation (Caravantes et al. Reference Caravantes, Elizondo and Lombardo2025; Chenoweth and Marks Reference Chenoweth and Marks2022; Lombardo Reference Lombardo2024; Verloo and Paternotte Reference Verloo and Paternotte2018) and challenging institutional exclusion, these dynamics have broader implications for democratic life and the conditions sustaining progressive, egalitarian, and nonviolent societies.

Intersectional Dimensions of VAFA

VAFA also operates intersectionally across two interrelated dimensions. The first corresponds to structural intersectionality, understood as how social and institutional structures produce qualitatively different experiences for people differently positioned in diverse power structures (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1991). In this dimension, violence and hostility are shaped by the intersection of multiple axes of inequality, depending on advocates’ gender identity, race, migration status, sexuality, or social class. These intersectional configurations are also context-dependent: VAFA takes specific forms across political and geographical settings, shaped by local power relations, institutional arrangements, and prevailing forms of political violence, and may vary substantially in both form and intensity.

The second intersectional dimension concerns the articulation of VAFA with other forms of political violence. VAFA is shaped intersectionally not only by who feminist advocates are, but also by what they defend. Feminist advocates may therefore be targeted in specific ways when they engage with contested political projects such as trans rights, anti-racism, migrant and refugee rights, or territorial struggles. In these cases, VAFA intersects with other forms of political violence, producing distinct configurations of hostility and harm.

These two intersectional dimensions are deeply interconnected, since VAFA emerges through the articulation between advocates’ social positioning and the political agendas they defend. These attacks are not experienced as isolated incidents, but rather as sustained forms of harassment, intimidation, and hostility that often operate through emotional and affective mechanisms such as fear, exhaustion, and hypervigilance. It is precisely the cumulative and persistent nature of these attacks that gives them a broader disciplining function, shaping not only the lives and participation of those directly targeted, but also the conditions under which feminist and queer political engagement becomes possible across institutional, activist, academic, and digital spaces.