Patriarchy and gender roles

The cultural root of violence

To understand why a woman may have difficulty perceiving that she is being abused, it is essential to look beyond the couple's relationship and analyze the social "breeding ground" in which we have been educated.

Western societies, despite legislative advances, have historically cultivated violence through traditions, norms and customs that implicitly or explicitly justify aggressive behavior in everyday life and establish men as the natural source of authority.

Most of the world's cultures are still guided by patriarchal structures that subordinate women, considering them in many ways inferior to men and even treating them as the husband's property.

These cultural traditions inculcate female submission as a virtue, creating an ideological basis that normalizes the imbalance of power in intimate relationships.

Reification and the deprivation of subjectivity

There is a disturbing parallel between the actions of the psychological aggressor and the historical functioning of patriarchy.

In perverse violence, the abuser works to strip the woman of her identity and turn her into an object useful to his ends, depriving her of her subjectivity.

This individual process is a reflection of the macroscopic social process that patriarchy has exercised for centuries: turning women into an "object of desire" or service for men.

Therefore, when an aggressor dehumanizes his partner, he is not acting in a vacuum, but is reproducing (in an extreme and pathological way) a cultural imprint that legitimizes the use of women as a means and not as an end in itself.

The construction of gender identity

The most determining factor in the blindness to violence is the "gender role". This concept refers to the set of norms and expectations that society dictates about how a person should behave based on their biological sex.

Through gender socialization, it prescribes what it is to "be a man" (strong, dominant, rational) and "be a woman" (nurturing, emotional, compliant).

By internalizing these models from childhood, an identity is constructed that tends to perpetuate differences and inequality.

If a woman has learned that her value lies in self-sacrifice and family harmony, it will be much more difficult for her to identify her partner's control as violence, since she will confuse it wi