The Decontextualisation of Gender-Based Violence: Institutional Templates, Differential Legibility, and the Reproduction of Systemic Violence

Abstract

Background. Gender-based violence (GBV) is conventionally analysed as an outcome that institutions fail to prevent. This review advances a different proposition: that the institutions charged with responding to GBV are themselves sites where the phenomenon is constituted, through a process this paper terms institutional decontextualisation — the severing of violent acts from their relational and structural context and their recoding against narrow templates of recognisable victimhood.

Objectives. The review pursues three linked objectives derived from a prior narrative synthesis: (i) to specify how gendered discourses and stereotypes reproduce GBV across judicial, educational, health and media institutions; (ii) to examine how those same discourses condition the visibility of male victims and the institutional response available to them; and (iii) to establish how intersectional axes — race, class, migration status, sexual orientation, age and rurality — modify both dynamics.

Methods. An integrative review was conducted over a semantic retrieval of approximately 138 million records via three structured queries (n = 200), screened at abstract stage against three a priori criteria, yielding 134 sources for extraction and 80 for narrative synthesis. Eight custom extraction dimensions were applied. Load-bearing empirical claims were independently verified against a second bibliographic corpus, and a supplementary hand-search addressed an identified Ibero-American deficit.

Findings. Across all four institutional domains the evidence converges on a common mechanism rather than four separate failures. Stereotypes function not as background bias but as operative filters determining which harms become administratively legible. The same mechanism produces two distinct outputs: for women — and disproportionately for racialised, migrant and low-income women — high-volume harm is processed through templates that discredit any deviation from the "ideal victim"; for men, LGBTIQ+ persons and non-heteronormative arrangements, harm falling outside the template is frequently not processed as harm at all. Three independent systematic reviews converge on masculine identity norms as a structural barrier to help-seeking, while the same evidence base cannot adjudicate the gender symmetry debate. Only 8 of 80 sources were anchored in Latin America, and only 5 employed primarily quantitative designs.

Conclusions. Legislative reform without corresponding transformation of institutional interpretive practice reproduces a persistent normative gap. Recognising male victimisation does not require de-prioritising women; the two claims are consistent because they describe the same mechanism operating on differently positioned populations. The review specifies which institutional design features could be altered without such a trade-off.