Stigma as Social Control: Gender-Based Violence Stigma, Life Chances, and Moral Order in Kenya

The stigma associated with gender-based violence (GBV) exacerbates its physical and mental health impacts, as well as the chances of experiencing additional violence. We extend understanding of this stigma and its effects by demonstrating how stigma operates as a mechanism of social control at both interactional and structural levels to preserve the moral order. We also further general stigma theory by clarifying the conceptualization of power that befits understanding stigma as a mechanism of social control that has cognitive, interpersonal, structural, and moral components. Analysis of data from 6 focus groups with women survivors of intimate partner violence and 19 interviews with close others and key informants in Kenya shows that the moral order, or what matters most, is maintenance of the marital unit, to a great degree because it is the institution that maintains the economic survival of women and children. The cultural belief that a woman experiencing spousal abuse has violated normative gender and spousal expectations and is therefore a threat to the moral order of the community demands that both husbands and community members act to protect the moral order. Protection of the moral order is accomplished through discrimination against survivors that is institutionalized through custom, law, and the family. Thus stigma acts as a, albeit contested, community process of social control that (re) produces gendered power geographies.