Perspective Chapter: Domestic Violence and Femicides in Germany and Iran – Families as a Place of Uncertainty in Democratic and Nondemocratic Settings

Abstract

Drawing from many years of research in Iran and Germany, the chapter discusses the relationship between the state, family, domestic violence and femicides in both contexts. The ethnographic-based writing draws a complex picture of families as a place of uncertainty and insecurity and shows how these uncertainties are related to legal discourses on gender violence and the state. By making these lines of relationship comprehensible, in the chapter an ethnographic counternarrative is created that wants to challenge specific assumptions on gender relations, domestic violence and trauma in Germany and Iran, in democratic and nondemocratic settings. The chapter is not about a comparison of the two countries and societies. The ethnographic work tries to understand how experiences of violence and trauma are related to German and Iranian identities. After a femicide, trauma becomes part of the daily experiences of the families of the victims in their search for justice and in the encounters with state representatives.

1. Introduction

This chapter is prompted by the article “The Feminist Paradox: The Brutal Back-lash of Emancipation,” which was published in 2023 [1]. The article describes the paradox of women’s growing achievements in education and the world of work in Germany, which is currently accompanied by increasing violence against women, especially in the domestic sphere. Susan Faludi described as early as 1991 how a massive setback hit feminist achievements in the 1980s [2]. Faludi located this backlash in an ongoing cycle of feminist progress and regression. However, the current backlash in Germany no longer follows one after the other, but simultaneously. It seems to many that the topic of gender is overrepresented in the context of culture and the media, but at the same time violence against women is increasing rather than decreasing [1].

The second reason for this chapter is the protests in Iran in the year 2022 that followed the death of Jina Mahsa Amini, who attracted international attention with the slogan “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” “Women, Life, Freedom”. Many people have since been imprisoned, executed, killed on the streets or disappeared in Iran. In conversations with my Iranian colleagues and friends who live in Germany, the solidarity expressed by German society was not only gratefully received, but also viewed critically. Many of my conversation partners heard sentences such as: “Finally, people are standing up against this injustice and violence against women!”

Anyone familiar with the history and the ongoing struggle of Iranian society and Iranian women in particular will understand why my Iranian acquaintances felt patronized. Iran has a decades-long history of movements promoting women’s rights, both before and after the revolution of 1979. Most of them pursued a vision of equality under law and sought to redress the gap regarding legal protection by promoting international human rights instruments.

“One of the major challenges of contemporary Anthropology is to develop ways to do ethnography of the transnational world. As it is increasingly clear that transnational connection and confrontations shape everyday life around the world, we confront the question of how to examine these processes ethnographically” [3].

Far be it from me to make a comparison between two countries, Germany and Iran, and two societies in this chapter. I would rather like to try to bring together and think about my experiences and observations as an ethnographer, which I made in both societies during my researches. In doing so, I would like to understand how violence against women is made visible. How is it talked about or not? How we read and understand numbers and statistics on the issue on one side and how injustice, being safe or not is a matter of feelings and emotions on the other side. What assumptions underlie the relationship of democracy/totalitarianism and domestic violence and violence against women? How can we engage with the concept of family as a system, and a place of uncertainty and a context of violence?

By focusing on male violence against women on heteronormative categories and relationship constellations runs the risk of essentializing and reproducing binary gender constructions of men and women. I write with the awareness that neither women nor men represent a homogenous, uniform group, nor are they the only possible gender identities. Furthermore, different positionings within the social fabric can arise from other intersecting factors, such as social background, ethnicity, faith, age, sexual orientation and identity. Current data show that 95% of the homicides registered worldwide in the Trans Murder Monitoring (TMM) concerned trans women or feminine-identified persons, predominantly migrants and persons of color as well as sex workers. This indicates that, in addition to deviation from the heteronorm, identification with “femininity” increases vulnerability to lethal violence [4].

My research follows works on violence that contributed to the Anthology “Violence and Gender in the Globalized World” which expands the critical picture of gender and violence in the age of globalization by introducing a variety of uncommonly discussed geopolitical sites and dynamics [5].

The chapter is divided into eight sections. After a brief introduction to my ethnographic research work on violence in Section 2, I present in Section 3 a short history of the emergence of the term femicide and the problematization of its use. In Section 4, I deal with the the question of representation and learning about femicides and domestic violence. How can we contextualize statistics and numbers of violence against women? Here, it is important to engage with the question where and how violence against women is positioned in a democratic and a nondemocratic context. Sections 5 and 6 are concerned with the impossibility of comparison. Instead of comparing, I discuss reference points of my interlocutors and a for violent experiences and murder. Are experiences of violence and trauma considered to be part of German and Iranian identities or not?

Two ethnographic case studies from Iran and Germany are introduced in Section 7. What role do marriage, family and notions of the private and the public play in this? The chapter ends with a concluding section that raises the question where speaking and writing about violence against women can find its place and could be more impactful. It ends with both contexts Iran and Germany and the political and legal struggle against violence.

By the end of this chapter, we will have learned more about Germany than about Iran. Nevertheless, I would like to make precisely this mental connection in understanding and talking about violence against women and how our knowledge about it is situated and positioned.

2. Researching violence, activism and trauma

After working for many years on political violence, transnational relations of two generations of female Iranian activists I have been researching questions of “trauma, violence, and social justice” in Germany since 2015.

My study in the years 2003–2009 had focused on two generations of Iranian women and their lives in three different cities: Berlin, Tehran and Los Angeles. In my book, I show the connections and interactions between gender relations and the historical and political transformation processes in Iran and the Iranian diaspora.

The women featured in the book were protesters, revolutionaries and contemporary witnesses. They participated in the violent political upheaval of their country, after which they themselves were often persecuted and imprisoned or had to live underground before they could leave Iran. Their daughters may or may not have taken up their mothers’ activism, grew up in Iran or in the diaspora and have other points of reference to which they refer today as young women.

Since 2015, my work focuses on the families of victims of violence and feminicides in Germany. The country where I am originally from and where I live. I was specifically interested in the question of how experiences of loss and injustice through a violent death and subsequent state investigations influence the conceptions of the German democratic welfare state. What notions of justice are expressed and negotiated in this process? What are the sites for this process of negotiation? What relationship can be identified between language, trauma, and the body, and what social and cultural norms play a role when relatives encounter police officers, legal representatives and psychological evaluators?

During my research, it very quickly became apparent that most of the cases I was dealing with were cases where boyfriends or husbands had killed their partners or women were killed by their stalkers or rapists. So, I started to focus specifically on questions of femicide.

Violence and its impact on everyday life, violence as part of gender relations and its intragenerational transmission are core themes in both my researches.

There are different types and definitions of violence. Some of them refer to physical violence alone, others are based on a broader understanding of violence, which also includes nonintended or visible violence [6, 7, 8, 9]. The fact what is defined as violence and what is not says something about the social context and the social circumstances in which respective understandings exist. My work is based on the assumption that definitions of violence vary and change over time. They are always based on certain values and norms that have been culturally, politically and legally shaped [10]. In his analyses, the social anthropologist Georg Elwert has repeatedly pointed out that violence contains elements of emotionality (or the creation of emotions) as well as elements of rational planning [11].

In an age in which discussing the subjective experience of political violence is impossible without reference to trauma and to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Schramm and Argenti argue that it is inevitable to raise the questions as to whether the trauma paradigm is to be understood as an empirical description of a universal human psychic response to violence, as a Western culture-bound syndrome, as a folk model of suffering, as a social movement or as a global discourse as manifold in its interpretations and it is pervasive in its reach. Can one move from an analytical model of individual, psychic trauma to one of collective or social trauma as one can between individuals and collective memory? [12].

In order to develop a differentiated social understanding of women in violent relationships, it is important to look at which social, psychological, economic or political factors lead to women living in situations of intimate partner violence for a long time [13]. It is important to examine how violence against women is remembered and talked about or silenced and to recognize that women develop complex and individual strategies of action by which they can lead a life in which they are exposed to massive violence, sometimes over many years [14].

3. Femicide: a term, its use and impact

The term femicide is used when women or girls are killed simply because they are female. The murderer or manslayer can be the partner, but femicide also refers to the targeted killing of women and girls in armed conflicts or as part of gang warfare. The term has its origins in an article from 1990, written by Diana Russell and Jane Caputi. The two authors described femicide as the extreme end of a continuum of violence against women, whether physical or verbal. “Whenever these forms of terrorism result in death, they become femicide” [15]. The term femicide or intimate femicide refers to the killing of women by men to whom they were close. However, one of the most important contributions to this conceptual and political elaboration can be found in the development of the word feminicide to link the crimes to the responsibility of the state. The Mexican anthropologist Marcela Lagarde used the word feminicide (and not femicide) to emphasize that these crimes were not only misogynistic, but also went unpunished [16].

The term femicide or feminicide is therefore a conceptual definition and a tool for making gender-based violence visible. The term is a helpful tool in discussions and negotiations in the field of gender equality. It makes it possible to point to patriarchal structures that are still in place. According to feminist explanations, violence is a significant component, possibly even a central mechanism of a socially existing gender hierarchy and structural oppression of women [17, 18]. This hierarchy and oppression are part of patriarchal structures within society.

The term serves activist and civil society organizations in negotiating victims’ rights with state bodies and legal institutions and in fighting for other legal sanctions.

But what happens when the term is rarely or not at all used for statistical surveys? What happens if the term is only used from one side, the activist civil side, and is rejected by the state and the legal side, as in Iran? Or not used in German court rulings? Such a negotiation also presupposes the possibility of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), i.e., nongovernmental bodies. If this is not the case, the negotiation of female violence takes place under other circumstances in other contexts.

Structural violence of the state is nothing new to us, nor are power asymmetries [19]. There are negligent states like the Iranian, yet Germany is not considered one of them. It is a democratic, wealthy nation, with a very elaborate set of social institutions and a plurality of NGOs working in the social sector.

A public debate about the unjust treatment of families of murder victims started during the National Socialist Underground (NSU) Trials in 2018. One of the longest trials in German postwar history ended with a life sentence for the sole survivor of a neo-Nazi terrorist cell, but failed to answer questions raised by victims’ relatives. Critical voices of journalists and activists pointed out that the process that started in Germany with the NSU trial is unlikely to be truly finished until the institutional racism in the country is faced and addressed accordingly [20].

The consummation of my research adds to these critical voices. It reveals that next to the profound problem of structural racism, other patterns of violation and injustice are interwoven in the German legal system, which contradict the constitutional promise of a welfare state and play a prominent role in the suffering of women and their families. My research points to the institutional mechanisms that execute the duty of care through governmental and bureaucratic control and illustrates that this kind of care in Germany is increasing suffering as opposed to reducing it.

4. How to contextualize statistics on violence against women?

Statistics and figures are important elements in making the dimensions of those affected by violence clear. Hana Arendt talks about the relationship between facts, evidence and opinions. From Arendt’s point of view, politics should maintain its links with the public realm, i.e., with the world. This connection requires a discourse on reality that is made via its representation of reality [21]. It is precisely in this representation that the notion of truth has meaning for politics. Through statistics, lived evidence of collectives can be made visible, they can become facts. The lived experience becomes a number that can be juxtaposed with other numbers. Arendt points out that one’s own opinion should always be based on a clear understanding of the relationships between facts and evidence and opinion and also their instrumentalization.

The negotiation of evidence and facts and their instrumentalization is part of the political project. The spectator can verify the solidity and coherence of the factual dimension and the storytelling based on it, and can therefore argue in favor of the authentic and constructive value of opinions, the outcomes of an active engagement with her/his own present. I argue that enabling these negotiations is part of a democratic understanding or promise. The lived experience needs to become something measurable in order to be represented and compared. This is precisely the problem when we deal with statistics and figures in the context of violence.

In the year 2022, 105 women and three children were killed/died, 89 women, five men, two girls and one boy were life critically injured because of violence against them through family members and partners in Germany.

In my work with families of victims of femicides, I have learned over the years that the situation of missing persons, or questionable suicides and domestic violence, is an important part of the context of murder and homicides. They often represent a kind of continuum: the murder is preceded by years of domestic violence, then a person is first reported missing until at some point the body is found… If I look at these numbers that are collected about femicides in Germany, I do not find any figures here on dubious suicides, on missing persons cases, on accidents, on cases that were not interpreted as femicides and were therefore not included in the statistics. When dealing with the topic, it is therefore always a matter of compiling certain statistical values and contextualizing them. Terminologies, definitions and designations of the respective context are extremely important to understand. Statistics and their use therefore actually represent contested discourse spaces in Foucault’s sense.

In 2022, at least 56 children were killed since the anti-regime protests by security police in Iran (46 boys and 12 girls reported), over 500 people died in the protests and over 100 executions took place.

How do I read these figures about Iran?

Although it is clear that the protests in 2022 were triggered by structural violence against women, these statistical figures are then related to a context of violence that no longer takes the gender aspect of violence into account. People who die in the conflict are victims of the conflict, they become “political figures” and although gender-based violence should be located in the political arena, it is not. In order to understand the figures, a different juxtaposition of lived evidence and facts is required.

Who collected these figures, both on the German and the Iranian sides? Which internal or external resources find the information and put it into what context? What controversial areas of discourse do we enter when we want to compare and discuss figures from different countries on one topic? None of these considerations are new, but in an increasingly globalized and digitalized world, in times of post-factual societies and internal social divisions, they are all the more important than before.

Although numbers provide important information, they tell us nothing about context. Neither do many court rulings in Germany. In my ethnographic research in courtrooms, I was part of a trial in which a young woman had been stabbed to death by her husband. The neighbors of the house reported that the woman had experienced domestic violence for years; she was seen with facial injuries, they heard arguing, and beating. The husband had pleaded insanity due to cannabis use and was peddling. In the court decision declaring the man insane, there was no mention of the years of domestic violence. It was not part of the court’s decision. Thus, this case does not count statistically.

This case is representative of many that I have witnessed afterwards, in which domestic violence is therefore not a subject of social and legal discussion. Since the woman’s death was the end result, the trial was only concerned with the question of intent and responsibility. The crime was thus decontextualized to a certain extent. Following Didier Fassin’s ethnographic approach, ethnographic work can be understood as a counterinvestigation. Hereby, it is essential to acknowledge a countering of the authoritative “judicial truth” with an “alternative ethnographic truth” [22]. The ethnographic description and interpretation can contextualize differently and can contribute to a more differentiated understanding of violence against women.

5. Never promised or the betrayed promise

Intimate partner violence against women is widespread within German society. However, the exact extent of this cannot be recorded due to high dark field figures [23].

In 2004, a representative study on violence against women was conducted on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth entitled “Living Situation, Health and Safety of Women in Germany.” This was evaluated secondarily in 2008 under the aspect of “violence in couple relationships.” Furthermore, an EU (European Union)-wide survey on violence against women was conducted in 2014 by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, from which data on Germany can also be deciphered. The current data presented here come from the criminal statistics evaluation on partnership violence by the Federal Criminal Police Office from 2018. According to this, 140,755 people in Germany were victims of violence within their (ex)partnership in 2018. The offenses included: intentional and dangerous bodily harm, threats, stalking and coercion, deprivation of liberty, murder and manslaughter, rape and sexual coercion. In all categories, women were the majority of victims of the violent crime [24]. According to the EU-wide survey on violence against women and also the German prevalence study from 2004, every third woman experiences physical and/or sexual violence at least once during her lifetime. Around one in four women experiences physical and/or sexual assault within at least one of their relationships [25]. Contrary to common assumptions, intimate partner violence is not something that can be attributed to certain marginalized groups in society. Violence can consistently occur in all social strata and regardless of the origin and ethnicity of those affected [26].

During my research on families of femicide victims in Germany between 2015 and 2021, I have often had the same lines of conversation with people who have asked me about my research. When I reported on the victim’s case and experiences of their families at the courts and with the police, which many described as degrading, the desperation of the families to get no legal support, to find themselves in a bureaucratic labyrinth, the total loss of trust in the German state, the courts, in the German system of a welfare state, and that usually no one would believe them, when they expressed how they were treated. My conversation partners replied that this was nevertheless a relatively small group in Germany and that this was very special research. Often, people said that although the situation in Germany was portrayed badly, it was still better than elsewhere. This answer always made me perplexed. To relativize injustices that happen in one’s own society by saying that it is worse elsewhere may be true to a certain extent, but it cannot release one from the responsibility to perceive and acknowledge the injustice experienced in one’s own context and, in the best case, to understand how it could have come about.

This “somewhere else” usually remained in the room. If people knew that I had done research in Iran, they often said, “Yes, compare that with Iran.” And people would share their assumption and ideas of a country they have never been to. They would talk about images of Iranian society, that they, of course, mostly had taken from the media. A widespread assumption about Iran is that Islam as a monolithic religion controls all aspects of Iranian society that means an automatic connection between national affiliation and a religious Islamic identity is often assumed. Particularly in the discussion about women from Iran, a very uniform image of “Muslim women” is often drawn, in which the female role, its legitimization through religion and its discrimination are in the foreground. These attributions are often exhausted in a dichotomous categorization, which either depicts the classic victim role or the type of opponent.

So in the response of my German conversation partners, women in Iran were identified as victims of the society and government per se, the structural suppression of women was pointed out, while the victims of femicides in Germany were treated as an unfortunate terrible personal destiny.

Both descriptions are not wrong, but they are incomplete: one is missing the agency of women in Iran, the other description is missing the structural violence that women experience in Germany. “Violence is a phenomenon that must be understood in both directly physical and structural terms. While it seems important to us to focus on physical violence, we consider the sociological restriction of the definition of violence to physical injury to be a step backwards in the study of violence as a whole. It loses sight of the fact that “normality” as such can by no means or in the rarest of cases be characterized as free of violence, an assumption that pushes the phenomenon of violence back to the margins of society” [27].

After thinking about it for a while, my answer was: The women that I have met in Iran, unlike the women in Germany, never assumed that their state, their courts and their police would support them. In the case of Iran, my interlocutors have been very clear that their state is their perpetrator.

They had no constitution to refer to, to give them any agency, but nevertheless try to fight for justice.

My interlocutors in Germany on the contrary felt betrayed. They referred to the loss of dignity in the legal process and referred to the first paragraph of the fundamental rights of the German constitution: “Human dignity is inviolable. Respecting and protecting it is the duty of all state authority.”

These lived contradictions, i.e., the expectation that representatives of the welfare state deal with victims in a caring manner, and that this was experienced differently in most cases in encounters with the police, the judiciary, in psychological assessment procedures and, furthermore, in encounters with the media, lead to a permanent loss of trust in the German legal and welfare system among the group of victims in Germany. For them, the welfare state turns out to be an imaginary one [28] and an institution that acts toward them in an authoritarian and mostly empathy-less manner.

While analyzing the heart of the liberal rule of law and its idea of justice, the French sociologist de Lagasnerie discovered a paradox: in order to convict someone, an individualistic explanation of the crime and its causes must be created; but at the same time, every crime is conceived as an aggression against “society” and the “state.” He presents law as the rule of reason—that, at the same time, “produces deprivations and traumas” [29]. This tense relationship between law and emotions is owed to the fact that modern legal thought is characterized by a strong rationality paradigm. Accordingly, law can only be applied effectively on the basis of reason alone, which necessitates the consequent exclusion of emotions [30]. This results in police, lawyers and judges having insufficient educational experience with vulnerable clients. In practice, however, many of their clients are such highly affected people.

One of my interlocutors in Germanys once turned to me in a group discussion and asked: “You are the scientist here, maybe you can tell me, if a term exists, that describes the situation, when your own state becomes the violator. Is there a name for it? Because that’s what happens to us…” I answered that I would call it structural violence.

6. Including or excluding violence as a part of identity and belonging and paradoxies in democracies

The Iranian feminist scholar Mir-Hosseini writes:

“One of the main contributions of feminist voices and scholarship in Islam is to unmask the power politics that are defended in the guise of religious values and Shari‘a; in doing so they are creating a public voice that can break down ideological polarizations such as those between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ feminism, and between ‘Islam’ and ‘human rights,’ and point us to the main battleground, which is that between patriarchy and despotism on the one hand, and gender equality and democracy on the other” [31].

Hosseini brings despotism and patriarchy and democracy and gender equality together. She expresses the belief in democratic systems that are enabling gender equality. Here, an idea is formulated that democracies can enable a place of political action as equal action. According to Arendt, being a political actor is a function or characteristic of equal action with other people. “Equality is a condition and a characteristic of political action itself and at the same time its goal”: Judith Butler raises this concern in her “Notes on a Performative Theory of Assembly” and sees equal action as the basis for liberal action. The democratic promise of equality and an increasing violence against women seems to be a paradox.

In over 90 interviews I conducted during my research in Iran and in the Iranian diaspora in Germany and the USA, it turned out that women talked about violence as part of their identity as Iranians: the revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, the totalitarian regime with its moral and security police adds to a shared collective experience of different forms of violence. All women in Iran are exposed to the violence of a totalitarian and patriarchal system. Nevertheless, not all women are affected by this violence to the same extent. Iranian society is a multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual and multireligious society. All of this can play a role in violence against women at different levels and reinforce it.

In Germany, women or/and their families expressed that the experience of violence and its impact sheared them apart from their society. Even though the group of people I interviewed was extremely diverse in terms of social, and educational background, they all describe the violence they had experienced as something that disconnected them from their society, they felt cut off from a shared German identity. Most of my interlocutors expressed their isolation because people would not believe them, when they shared their experiences about an unjust and harsh treatment at court. They kind of felt that they disrupted a specific order of the society with their stories of violence and trauma. Looking at Germany’s turbulent history of a first world war, the holocaust, the second world war, a divided and reunited country, the exclusion of violence from German identity was somehow surprising to me.

How can violence connect or disconnect people? When is violence included or excluded from a collective narrative? Memory is not a simple, unmediated reproduction of the past, but rather a selective re-creation that is dependent for its meaning on the remembering individual or community’s contemporary social context beliefs and aspirations [12, 32].

I would like to argue that from a postcolonial perspective, violence and narratives of violence (in the narrow as well as the broad sense) lie in Eurocentric paradigms of modernity and its linkages to the state as a socioeconomic platform of population management based on an order highlighting freedom and democracy. The sought-out orderliness, as described by Foucault in The Order of Things [33], promotes a mosaic of categorical classification that strive to subjugate and govern or discipline and punish [34] [see [35]]. So, it is important to ask: freedom and democracy for whom? Who is violent to whom? Vázquez speaks of the “epistemic territory of modernity” which stands for progress, rationality, democracy and nonviolence [36]. Within this territory of knowledge production, real violence is usually located at a distance and in deviance to the others’ realities. That is, the experiences of “others” that are subjected to such produced violence; those in the “Global South”—a spatially dislocated geopolitical area: a conflict region; a conflict milieu sealed off by class and racial boundaries, with its own specific temporal axis, lagging way behind and below those of Europe. Violence in the European political narrative is thus mostly elsewhere and for somebody else—that is, the “other.” From this follows a binary modernist thinking that nonviolence prevails in the Eurocentric here and now. This understanding allows to take an analytical distance from the origin of violence itself, as well as from those who are considered irregular and irrational for producing it—that is, the illegitimate violent actors [37, 38]. Identities emerge as social products in a process at the heart of which is the reflection of the self in the other. In this sense, an identity is never just a positive formulation of what one is, but also a negation of what one is not. In that sense, European or in this chapter German identity I constructed by excluding violence. By remembering the German past of violence, but excludes them in today’s “everyday,” by breaking the history and continuity of violence and trauma and its transmission inside families and the society. In doing so, violence becomes part of the identities of “others.”

This is where Eurocentrism and male privilege overlap, in the absence of remaining silence and nonvisible in the context of violence. In following Foucault’s analytical model for discursive practices, it is always important to ask who is not heard and who is not seen. A public and media discourse that concentrates on women when focusing on solutions and ending intimate partner violence reproduces a distorted image of violence-specific dynamics and heteronormative relationships [39]. Why do men beat women? What makes men become violent? What values exist in a society in which the everyday lives of many women are characterized by violence? These questions are not asked. Instead of only asking victims why they did not leave their partner, the focus should be on perpetrators and sociocultural factors that perpetrate and cause violence [39]. The focus described above first makes male violence invisible and second makes women responsible for the situation. “Degendering the problem and gendering the blame” [39] is what US sociologist Nancy Berns aptly calls this. A racialized discourse attributes massive violence to certain groups of men, while the average German, white man of the majority society is ignored [40, 41]. These mechanisms, which are also referred to as “Orientalized sexism” [40], suggest that equality in terms of gender prevails in their own society, while other, primarily non-Western cultures, are characterized by the fact that women are oppressed by men.

Through a discourse in Germany that makes male violence invisible while focusing on women, male dominance is actively maintained. Not naming acts and making perpetrators invisible are central dynamics that an insight into the discourse around intimate partner violence reveals. These dynamics are clear indicators of the power relations in which the issue is embedded and how male privilege comes into play. Although the issue actually has to do primarily with him as the perpetrator of the violence, he does not have to confront it or question himself. Instead, the discourse places the responsibility with the people who are exposed to the violence and thus also starts in the wrong place with regard to violence prevention [42]. Social anthropologist Georg Elwert’s basic thesis on conflicts is that the more conflicts are allowed and formalized, the better it is for peace in a society [11]. Although the quantity of conflicts increases, their intensity decreases. This is why conflict suppression and conflict avoidance are, first, counterproductive and usually lead to an escalation of conflicts. Above all, however, successfully resolved conflicts could be selection mechanisms for alternatives of social change for a society. Conflicts often bring alternative possibilities of social organization into view, even if only in the efforts to regulate them.

If Germany next to other European democratic countries attributes violence against women primarily to other countries, cultures and societies, then coloniality has an effect in European societies and prevents an appropriate confrontation with their own violence and their own conflicts. Colonial and patriarchal structures prevent democratic processes not just in the former colonized countries, but in the countries of the colonizers themselves.

“Knowledge-making in the modern/colonial world is at once knowledge in which the very concept of ‘modernity’ rests and the judge and warrantor of legitimate and sustainable knowledge.” Vandana Shiva (1993) suggested ‘monocultures of the mind’ to describe “Western imperial knowledge, its totalitarian and epistemically non-democratic implementation” [43].

In order to break this continuity, it is important to analyze and describe violence against women in keeping Walter Magnolol’s epistemic disobedience in mind [43].

We need to understand male violence, its causes and reproduction, and take the prevention of male violence as a central part of democratic work. If violence is an undemocratic, despotic and dominating act, why then, although figures and statistics on violence against women are known, does the issue still receive surprisingly little attention, and why are so few legal and political decisions made?

An important sentence that the Iranian President Chathami, who for many was the hope of democratic reforms, proclaimed in Iran in the early 2000s was: “Let people have their privacy. The protection of privacy from state and police control. One of the core ideas of democratic negotiations is the protection of privacy. The very idea of privacy had traditionally been linked to the idea of a ‘private sphere,’ most centrally the private home and the family, which was seen as especially deserving of protection.”

But what happens if this protection of the private sphere, which is an important part of democratic negotiation processes, prevents social recognition and an increased discussion of domestic violence as a structural problem and patriarchal domination?

7. Family as a place of uncertainty

Family and kinship have always been the subject of anthropological research. In the following case studies, I would like to deal with the fact that families are not only carriers of norms and values and economic institutions, but also with the extent to which, in dealing with violence against women and children, we include an approach to the concept of family that incorporates violence, trauma and uncertainty.

7.1 Choosing a husband and laws who are not in favor of women (a case study from Tabris)

When I met Rabeah, she was just about to decide on a husband. Rabeah’s family lives in the Azerbaijani city of Tabris in Iran. She comes from an important traditional family of carpet weavers and traders. Her current husband’s mother had asked Rabeah’s family if her son Ali, who was living in Canada, could register with the family’s second eldest daughter, who was still unmarried.

These calls from families suggesting their sons as potential husbands were commonplace in her family. In Tabris, people knew that she was not yet married, and this information was then passed on by families to their sons as far away as Canada or the USA. Rabeah was in her late twenties at the time, and the family urged her to get married. “You know, if I would have been born in Europe and live in Europe, I would not marry, but here it is different.” Rabeah’s brother started to collect information about Ali. He went to the neighbors and interviewed them about Ali and his family, he tried to talk to some old friends of Ali, whom he had spent time with, before he had moved to Canada.

At this point, Rabeah already had two suitors courting her, a man from Tabris and an Azerbaijani man who lived in England. Ali now joined the ranks of the suitors and wrote Rabeah an initial email. The two then began an intensive two-month email correspondence. The emails Ali sent usually contained poems or flowers that played music when you clicked on them, or he sent photographs of the Canadian countryside and their future home and described his life there. Rabeah’s emails, on the other hand, contained questions about his attitude toward women. She asked him, for example, if he knew about human rights and respected women’s rights. She told him that she wanted to study in Canada and asked if that was okay with him and if he would support her plans. She was a woman who was friends with both women and men. She wanted to continue these friendships as a married woman and hoped that he would be able to accept this as her husband.

While Ali wooed Rabeah with romantic gestures and material promises, she wanted to find out what kind of husband he would be and be sure that he would not restrict her rights and that she would not trap into a dominating and violent relationship [44]. After years, I had the chance to zoom with Rabeah. She had moved to Canada, had a child and was studying medicine. She expressed that she had made a good choice. Ali had turned out to be the partner she was hoping for.

Taraneh, an Iranian journalist whom I met after her divorce and who told me about her violent and controlling husband who had taken away her passport, so she could not leave the country for her work, beaten her, and with whom she had only stayed so long because she was afraid that he would be awarded custody of her daughter after the divorce, commented on Rabeah’s thoughts and questions about her husband as follows: “It is such an important decision whom you marry in Iran because the man has so many rights over you. You can have a great husband and it’s all good, but if a man here controls you and beats you, it’s very difficult to get rights here. That’s why women try to find out beforehand. And if you want to divorce, the law is not in the favor of women. Custody for children are many times granted to the man and his family. We cannot afford romantic ideas and daydreams when it comes to getting married” (Interview Taraneh, 4.10.2004, Teheran). Prof. T. from Teheran University added in an interview that most women she knew, who were exposed to sexual harassment at their working place, quit their work rather than reporting the harassment they had experienced. “They are too afraid that they will be held responsible for it and not the man” (Interview Prof. T., 11.10.2004, Teheran).

Iranian artist Soudabeh Ardavan made a direct connection between the regime and her father’s patriarchy in her written down memories of imprisonment: “It was only during my studies that I became aware of the close connection between my father’s dictatorial upbringing toward us children and my mother and the prevailing dictatorship in Iranian society” [45]. In many of my interviews and talks women pointed out that they have the feeling that Iranian society is a much more collective society than, for example, the French or German or British society they had encountered in their travels. “Privacy means something very different here than in your country” one of my interlocutors once pointed out.

7.2 Trying to leave an abusive relationship and femicide as a private matter (a case study from a small town in Germany)

When Sarah, who lived in a small town in Germany, met her partner, she did not clarify any questions about her rights with him. I never met Sarah, she was already dead when I met her mother. Sarah assumed that, I guess, as a German woman, living in Germany she did not have to ask her partner for permission about whom she meets and where she went and what she worked. The couple were not married, but moved together and had a daughter. Sarah’s partner had secretly installed a tracker in her cell phone to track where she is going, which she only found out later. He constantly tried to cut off contact with her family and friends. All of that was revealed after her death. The control over Sarah increased after the birth of the daughter.

During the symposium on intimate partner violence in Germany in 2022, it was confirmed by most of the speakers that the birth of children is the most dangerous time for women in violent relationships. When Sarah mustered up the strength to move out and separate, her partner killed her on the day she went to collect her boxes. The daughter had to listen to the act from the neighboring room. Sarah’s mother told me after her daughter’s death: “I left my violent husband when Sarah was little to protect myself and my daughter. We went back to Germany from the USA. Why could not I protect her this time? I keep asking myself that. Why did not I see that? Why did not I go with her to pick up her things? Why did not she talk to me about what was happening at home? (Interview Sarah’s mother 05.09.2018, Berlin).” After her death, Sarah’s mother fought for temporary custody of the granddaughter and had to go to court with the perpetrator’s family, who also sued for custody of the granddaughter. The partner, who killed Sarah, was sentenced for manslaughter and not for murder. Next year he will be released and then the right of access to his daughter will have to be clarified again. Sarah’s case is representative of many women in Germany who have entered into partnerships that turned out to be violent and ended with the death of women.

General constructions and distinctions of the spheres “public” and “private” in the German contexts go hand in hand with the fact that power relations and social inequality remain unnoticed. It is suggested that people are free and responsible in private, which leads to intimate partner violence also being seen as a private, individual problem [46, 47]. The constructions of “public” and “private” can be identified in the media representations of intimate partner violence described above. This is because the labeling of women’s killings as “family tragedy” or “relationship drama” implies that the incidents are private matters and individual fate. As a result, intimate partner homicide is not named for what it is: gendered homicide or femicide. Women are killed because of expectations and claims about their gender. The Central Information Office of Autonomous Women’s Shelters defines femicide as follows:

“Femicide refers to the intentional killing of a woman due to an alleged violation of traditional and normative role expectations. Women who want to make self-determined decisions about their lives, their bodies, their sexuality are violently punished by those who do not tolerate this” [48].

Reports suggesting that the public sphere is more dangerous for women than their own homes are not considering the day-to-day realities of many women’s lives. The myth of the safe home helps to maintain the subordinate status of women in society.

A murder can be compared to a stone thrown into the water resulting in wider ripple effects. A violent death is a massive injury that usually affects an entire community and influences and changes all areas of a survivor’s life.

As I just illustrated with Sarah’s story, behind femicides are complex life stories and relationships. Victim and perpetrator were family. What we often experience in real life is that “agency” is rarely black and white; trauma is not always that easy to parse as perpetrator-victim, doer-done to, bad guy-good guy. In many cases, an individual’s relationship to trauma is far more complex and involves choices he or she made of their own freewill.

When children are left behind, family members must engage in long, difficult and painful processes to determine their whereabouts and responsibilities. “I am functioning rather than living,” has been a recurring phrase I have heard. Intimate partner violence has a character of invisibility. It usually happens in a domestic environment and within one’s own four walls. This is another reason why the extent, everyday suffering of those affected and individual realities of life are difficult to grasp [49].

The assumption that women are the property of men has developed over a long period of time and therefore appears to be “natural.” Feminist philosopher Kate Manne describes the underlying mechanism and patriarchal structure as a “gendered economy of give-and-take of moral and social goods and services” [50]. It is suggested that men are entitled to women’s emotional, social, domestic and reproductive work. This manifests a male sense of ownership that relates to the female body and also claims and wants to control women’s actions and decision-making ability. If this supposed entitlement is called into question, for example when a woman decides to leave her husband/partner, this harbors the potential for women to be exposed to male violence. These underlying mechanisms can still be observed in all the cases of my ethnographic research.

8. Conclusion

Where should speaking and writing about violence against women find its place, when and where should the prevention work of violence start and should be situated? If we recognize that violence against women is as much a private as a public issue that it exists structurally and physically? If we recognize that men are exposed to patriarchal violence and reproduce it in domestic contexts? When do we see that a discourse of European modernity and its colonial content situates violence elsewhere and ascribes it to others?

Iranian women experience discrimination in law and in practice in ways that deeply impact their lives, particularly with regard to marriage, divorce and custody issues. Post-1979 compulsory hijab laws affect virtually every aspect of women’s public life in Iran. One of the most notable examples of women’s right activities after the revolution is the coalition of Islamist and secular feminist activists who came together to establish the “One Million Signature Campaign to Demand the Repeal of Discriminatory Laws” in 2006. Focus issues included age discrimination in establishing criminal responsibility and marriageable age, inequality in inheritance and discrimination of mothers as guardians in case of divorce.

The expansion of internet access in Iran has been integral to the next shift in activism. It has enabled millions to share information outside official channels of communication and also blurred the line between the public and the private, as it enables youth and women to blog about their lived experiences. (..) This shift from legal advocacy to digital social protest continues to push the boundaries of the social debate in public life [51, 52].

While women in Iran see their struggle for equal rights as, among other things, fighting for rights within the marriage and at the end of the marriage, i.e., to have the possibility of getting a divorce and custody of their children, the discussion about violence against women no longer seems to be conducted along the lines of the question of marriage. The end of marriage has already arrived in German society. There are many people who live in partnerships without being married and who share custody of their children. The end of marriage does not appear to be the end of domestic violence and femicides.

In 1999, as part of the “European Year against Violence against Women,” the German government adopted an action plan aimed at curbing violence against women by adopting concrete action strategies for intervention and prevention [53]. In 2002, these resulted in a nationwide Violence Protection Act, in which the perpetrator can be expelled from the place of residence if violence is threatened and/or used and is banned from contact for a certain period of time [54]. It was not until February 2018 that the so-called Istanbul Convention, which had already been adopted by the Council of Europe in 2011, came into force in Germany. Germany is now one of 33 states that is committed under international law to providing the appropriate resources and implementing agreed goals to prevent and combat violence against women [55]. However, there is criticism that this is not sufficiently implemented. For example, according to agreed targets of the Istanbul Convention, Germany lacks almost 15,000 women’s shelter places [56].

By not naming intimate partner killings for what they are, femicides, the motivations and dynamics of such acts are socially normalized and obscured. Gender-based homicide does not yet constitute a separate criminal offense in Germany. This leads all the more to the fact that the extent of these acts remains invisible and no social outcry can be observed [57]. Considering that in Germany on average every third day a woman is murdered by her (ex)partner, acts of violence are not only individual fates, but they reveal the serious structural extent of intimate partner violence [58]. It is especially important to develop a definition of violence that is sensitive to gender-specific dynamics, in addition to common definitions of violence. Especially from a feminist perspective, which deals with violence against women, it seems relevant to question common definitions of violence and explanations regarding violence against women and to examine their usefulness with regard to a perspective on violence that is sensitive to gender dynamics. Especially in view of the assumptions implicit in feminist theory that common ideas on the topic are permeated by patriarchal assumptions and shaped by a male power of definition, the elaboration of a gender-sensitive concept of violence is all the more challenging [59].