Redefining Violence against Women and Framing Issues

Previous studies have highlighted the importance of attitudinal and social change in making laws effective in their implementation. Moreover, scholarship on social movements found that one of the drivers of getting demands across the right platforms and being appropriately represented was by framing movements’ goals into collective identities. How can framing issues and the socio-political context explain the progress of women’s movements regarding violence against women? I argue that in Turkey and the Philippines, women’s movements redefined violence against women as a public issue by contesting the state rhetoric that domestic violence was an ungendered family matter, which led to the passing of protective laws against violence against women and more specifically on domestic violence. However, these movements’ attempts in the two countries to affect policy saw different consequences given the unified agenda that they could follow and the political climate in which they could operate.