Reducing gender-based violence requires turning our attention to what we normally do not see, says Alfred Omenya of Eco-Build Africa. In this week’s podcast, Omenya, who collaborated on a four-year study investigating all types of violence in four cities around the world, explains how certain forms of gender-based violence are “invisible” in conventional research and policy.

Gender-based violence hides in a number of places; culture is one, he says. “We found out that there’s quite a lot of structural violence condoned by society, sometimes not even identified as such, embedded in culture.” Structural gender-based violence is “largely ignored by most researchers and policymakers because it’s assumed that that’s just the way the society is… It’s only when you look at the figures that you are shocked that there has been so much culturally sanctioned rape, for example.”

Though gender-based violence occurs in the public domain as well as the private, violence in the home is often overlooked, he says. There are a number of responses available to help curb public violence, including improved policing, hotspot mapping, and mobile and internet technology, but relatively few policy interventions can penetrate the bedroom door. This makes it far more difficult to measure and address.

Conventional wisdom also maintains that “the poorer you are the more likely you are to perpetrate gender-based violence,” he says, but this may not always be the case. In Santiago, Chile, Omenya found high rates of gender-based violence across all economic classes – the only distinction was that wealthier households hid it better, motivated in part by their perception of gender-based violence as a lower-class phenomenon.

The drivers of gender-based violence defy simplistic explanations. What is clear, says Omenya, is “male-female violence is way more complex than patriarchy.” Economic factors, such as the aspirations of the middle class, can transcend patriarchy and create stresses that “translate into direct violence within the family.”

Strategies to reduce gender-based violence tend to look at it in isolation. But new research suggests it may be linked to other forms of violence, like political conflict, and should be viewed in a broader societal context. Policy responses should seek to illuminate and address the full range of gender-based violence – including structural, private, and higher-income – rather than focus only on its most visible manifestations, he says.