As the global 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence begins, we are once again called to confront the pervasive and complex realities of violence against women. But for South Asian women, violence is not only what breaks bones or fills hospital rooms. The most enduring forms leave no bruises. They are carried quietly, almost elegantly, beneath the rituals of family, culture, and respectability.
Violence in South Asia often appears as expectation, as discipline, as the daily requirement to perform an acceptable version of womanhood. A girl must be graceful but not vain, educated but not assertive, desirable but not desiring. She must look beautiful, yet effortlessly so, modestly so, in ways that bolster the family’s dignity rather than her own autonomy.
The violence here is subtle but powerful: it trains women to constantly calibrate themselves. Not too much. Not too little. Just enough to be acceptable.
Feminist theory reminds us that violence extends far beyond physical harm. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence and Johan Galtung’s framing of structural violence illuminate the South Asian experience: harm becomes normalised when it is woven into culture. A woman policed for her weight, skin tone, clothing, or voice is not merely being judged; she is being disciplined into a narrow ideal of femininity that prizes compliance over personhood.
This is violence masked as love. As guidance. As “what’s best for you.”
It is the mother who says, “Don’t laugh so loudly; people are watching.”
The grandmother who warns, “Don’t get too dark; it will affect your future.”
The husband suggests ambition is “stressful” and that she maintain balance by shrinking.
The community that shames a girl for being too outspoken, too modern, too visible.
These are not harmless cultural quirks. They are acts of control that restrict the range of womanhood itself.
As the 16 Days of Activism begin, our responsibility is not just to condemn physical violence but to expose the daily, normalised, beautifully packaged violences that make physical harm possible
But as we name these forces, we must also acknowledge a harder truth: this violence is not perpetuated by men alone. Women, too, carry these structures forward. Not because they are inherently oppressive, but because for generations they have been socialised into systems that reward conformity and punish divergence. Mothers, aunties, grandmothers, teachers (often with profound love) become guardians of norms they themselves learned to survive.
As women, we have internalised the boundaries of patriarchy so deeply that we sometimes enforce them before men ever need to. We police each other’s choices, appearances, ambitions, and freedoms because we were taught that safety and respectability lie in compliance. We warn each other not to be “too loud,” “too bold,” “too visible,” believing we are protecting. But actually, preserving the system that confines us.
This is not a call for blame; it is a call for recognition. If women have helped sustain these structures, then women also have the power, and the responsibility, to dismantle them. To expand the boundaries for one another. To stand with each other instead of scrutinising each other. And to practise grace where we were conditioned to practise judgement.
And part of this transformation requires women to stop pitting women against each other. Stop the comparisons, the competition, the subtle rivalries. There is enough space for all of us. Liberation cannot coexist with scarcity thinking. Empowerment cannot grow in the soil of comparison.
Even today, in a world abundant with feminist vocabulary and digital empowerment, these expectations persist. And sometimes deepened by technology itself. Social media creates a new arena for discipline, a space where women’s bodies, choices, and identities are scrutinised not just by families or neighbours but by entire diasporic communities. A South Asian woman may leave geographic boundaries yet remain trapped in cultural surveillance.
Deniz Kandiyoti’s “patriarchal bargain” helps explain why: many women learn to endure and perform these expectations because resistance is punished while compliance is rewarded. But survival is not freedom. And endurance is not empowerment.
As the 16 Days of Activism begin, our responsibility is not just to condemn physical violence but to expose the daily, normalised, beautifully packaged violences that make physical harm possible. Every silenced opinion, every controlled decision, every comment that pushes a woman to shrink a little more, these are the foundations upon which more visible violence is built.
South Asian women deserve a world where they are not constantly negotiating their existence, not weighing every gesture or word against an invisible standard of acceptability. A world where beauty is not a burden, where dignity is not conditional, and where belonging does not require self-erasure.
A world where women uplift one another, not compete for validation in systems designed to keep them small.
As the world observes these 16 days, the question is not only how we stop violence against women.
It is how we transform societies that require women to disappear to belong.