Survivor-Centered Solutions to Violence Against Women in Politics

Violence against women in politics (VAWIP) is a pervasive problem affecting politically active women worldwide, exposing how gendered power operates through and within political institutions. Leading solutions emphasize protect, punish, and prepare strategies that reproduce mainstream responses to violence against women (VAW). Drawing on critical  feminist theory and VAW scholarship, we argue that these solutions lean toward benevolent  sexism, carceral feminism, and white feminism, leaving intact the interlocking systems of subordination that produce violence. Alternatively, we propose a survivor-centered framework rooted in the feminist principles of contextuality, collective action, and intersectionality. We develop this framework through feminist assessments of Title IX that reveal how conventional strategies perpetuate harm. From these assessments, we identify survivor-centered strategies—accessibility, accountability, and alternatives—and apply them to VAWIP to generate survivorcentered solutions. We then track survivorcentered practice in ACOBOL, a Bolivian women politicians’ association, finding meaningful but incomplete progress, and draw on transformative justice work in the United States to address these gaps. We argue that anti-VAWIP researchers and practitioners should center a survivor-centered framework in both scholarship and practice.