How Concentrated Power Reproduces Gendered Violence Across Generations

The pattern described by this research is not a static distribution of harm across two groups. It is a cycle with five connected stages: concentrated power sustains gendered expectations, those expectations produce violence and disposability for both sexes through different mechanisms, the consequences of that violence fall on men and women through different channels, and the pattern is transmitted to the next generation, which reinforces the concentration of power that started the cycle.

Stage one: power is concentrated, not shared evenly among men

Institutional power is captured disproportionately by men who embody a specific, dominant version of masculinity: white, able-bodied, heterosexual, and economically secure (Schwiter et al., 2021; Cech, 2022). This is named directly in the literature as the patriarchal dividend, a general privileging effect that theoretically benefits men collectively but is captured narrowly in practice (Schwiter et al., 2021). In one study, white able-bodied heterosexual men in STEM fields reported meaningfully greater social inclusion and career opportunity than men in thirty-one other intersectional categories measured in the same dataset (Cech, 2022).

Stage two: concentrated power sustains gendered expectations

Institutions reproduce the gendered discourses that underpin men's violence and inequality (Wilcox et al., 2020; Seymour et al., 2021). Family and religious institutions specifically justify and reinforce the subordination of younger or non-conforming men to senior men, and the same institutions assign women to caregiver and dependent roles (Idriss, 2021). Male perpetration of intimate partner violence is described in the research as an expression of gendered power and control, shaped by hierarchical structures that reproduce relations of violence rather than originating from individual pathology alone (Seymour et al., 2021; Ayubi & Satyen, 2023).

Stage three: those expectations produce violence and disposability for both sexes, through different channels

Adolescent boys who endorse hierarchical, unequal gender norms are significantly more likely to perpetrate dating violence and sexual coercion (Malhi et al., 2020). Hostile masculinity and male peer support for violence against women mediate the link between childhood adversity and adult perpetration, indicating that violence functions as a socially learned behavior rather than a fixed trait (Sutton, 2024). The same set of norms that produces perpetration also produces one form of male disposability: men are expected to risk their bodies through dangerous labor, military service, and public violence, and occupational injury risk is measurably higher for men in construction, manufacturing, and natural resource sectors (Biswas et al., 2022).

Disposability is not restricted to men, and describing it that way understates what the data on women shows. Women who transgress traditional gender roles by becoming social leaders face gender-specific threats of sexual violence explicitly intended to force them back into the assigned role (Stallone & Zulver, 2024). Men's frustration at failing to fulfill the provider role, driven by unemployment or poverty, triggers gender-based violence specifically against women who assert basic needs (Zinyemba & Hlongwana, 2022), which functions as punishment for a woman declining to remain passively compliant within the role. Unpaid caregiving labor is treated as an inexhaustible, uncompensated resource, extracted without limit and rarely recognized as a form of risk at all (Colpitts, 2025). Where men's disposability is enacted publicly, through labor and institutional risk, women's disposability is enacted privately, through the withdrawal of protection or the escalation of violence the moment a woman stops serving the function assigned to her.

Stage four: the consequences split by sex, not by amount

Once violence and disposability are produced, the research shows the consequences are absorbed through two distinct mechanisms. Men disproportionately become violence's numeric casualties: roughly 87% of homicide victims in South Africa are men, most killed by other men who are more often acquaintances than intimates (Matzopoulos et al., 2023, 2025). Men also account for roughly 75% of the one million suicide deaths recorded globally each year (River & Flood, 2021; Richardson et al., 2021; King et al., 2024), a pattern connected to masculine norms that code emotional expression as a loss of status and code aggression as a gain (River & Flood, 2021).

Women's disposability shows up in the same data, through a different mechanism than the public casualty pattern described above. Globally, one in three women experiences physical or sexual violence from a partner or non-partner over her lifetime (Mannell et al., 2022; Nguefack-Tsague et al., 2024; Stojetz & Brück, 2023). When women are murdered, the perpetrator is overwhelmingly an intimate partner, an estimated 40 to 70% of cases, a rate roughly six times higher than the intimate-partner share of male homicides (Fanslow et al., 2023). Critically, this risk does not end when a woman leaves the relationship: intimate terrorism in former relationships was found to be far more common among women than men, meaning research limited to current relationships alone understates the true danger of separation (Cunningham & Anderson, 2022). That pattern, lethal violence that intensifies specifically at the point a woman stops serving the role assigned to her, is disposability, not passive absorption of harm. Women also carry an estimated three-quarters of the world's unpaid caregiving labor, extracted as an uncompensated and functionally limitless resource, a form of disposability that is rarely counted the way a workplace fatality or homicide is counted, and is instead folded into terms like marriage, motherhood, or duty.

Stage five: the pattern is transmitted to the next generation

This is the stage that closes the loop rather than ending it. Witnessing parental violence in childhood is the single strongest predictor of a man's lifetime intimate partner violence perpetration across all eight countries studied in the IMAGES survey, stronger than poverty, alcohol use, or general attitudes (Fleming et al., 2015). Childhood exposure to violence directly teaches aggression as a conflict-resolution strategy, and this correlation between exposure and later perpetration is significantly stronger for males than for females (Zhan et al., 2025). Adverse childhood experiences are linked to later intimate partner violence perpetration through psychological distress, a pathway that fully supports trauma-transmission theory (Hammock et al., 2026).

The transmission mechanism is not limited to direct violence exposure. Military conscription itself has been shown to socialize men into violent roles: an Argentine draft-lottery study found that conscription caused men to adopt more sexist attitudes and to engage in more intimate partner violence later in life (Gibbons & Rossi, 2022), demonstrating that institutions actively manufacture the very norms described in stage two, closing the loop back to the top of the cycle.

Why this is a cycle and not a static comparison

Each stage in this sequence functions as an input to the next, and the fifth stage feeds directly back into the first. Generational transmission does not simply repeat the violence, it repeats the belief system and the institutional structures that produced it, which is what allows the concentration of power described in stage one to persist across generations rather than eroding on its own. This structure explains a finding that otherwise looks contradictory: men can simultaneously hold concentrated institutional power and account for the majority of violence's numeric casualties, because the mechanism that sorts men into either category, the performance of dominance, toughness, and risk-tolerance, is the same mechanism the cycle reproduces at every stage. The same structure produces disposability for women through a separate channel: compliance with the caregiving and dependent role is what determines whether a woman is protected within it or discarded and punished for stepping outside it (Stallone & Zulver, 2024; Cunningham & Anderson, 2022).

One documented complication is worth naming directly, because it affects how this cycle gets discussed publicly. Claims of male victimhood are sometimes used rhetorically to deflect attention from structural power and to resist efforts to change the systems producing women's harm (Lysova & Dim, 2025; Venäläinen, 2020). This does not weaken the male-casualty data presented in stage four, which is independently sourced and consistent across countries. It indicates that the same data describing stage four can be, and sometimes is, deployed to obscure stages one and two rather than to explain the full cycle.

What the cycle indicates

The research supports a five-stage loop rather than two competing claims about which sex has it worse. Concentrated power sustains the gendered expectations that produce male violence and disposability. The consequences of that violence are absorbed differently by sex, men through casualty, incarceration, and isolation, women through intimate violence, reproductive danger, and unpaid economic burden. The pattern is then transmitted to the next generation through direct exposure, learned norms, and institutions that actively manufacture the same expectations again, which sustains the concentration of power the cycle began with. Breaking any single stage of this loop, without addressing the stages feeding it and the stage it feeds, is unlikely to interrupt the cycle as a whole.

On power concentration

• White, able-bodied, heterosexual, economically secure men in STEM reported meaningfully greater inclusion and career opportunity than men in 31 other intersectional categories measured in the same study (Cech, 2022). Male privilege isn't shared evenly among men, it's captured by a narrow slice of them.

On severe family violence and familicide specifically

• "Intimate terrorism," the pattern of repeated, escalating coercive control aimed at dominating a partner, as opposed to mutual situational conflict, is perpetrated almost exclusively by men (Straus, 2011; Swan et al., 2008).

• Homicide-suicide perpetrators are characterized by pathological dependence and extreme possession, most often triggered by fear of separation or suspected infidelity (Sacco et al., 2023). This is the profile behind the most extreme, family-destroying violence events.

• People show greater acceptance of instrumental harm befalling men than women, even in caregiving contexts where women have traditionally been expected to sacrifice (Graso et al., 2023), a social tolerance finding that helps explain why male-perpetrated severe violence gets less scrutiny at the point it could still be intervened on.

On disposability, men's version

• Men account for close to 92% of workplace fatalities.

• Only about 11% of homicide perpetrators carry a major diagnosable mental illness (Caman et al., 2022). Roughly 60% had no psychiatric contact at all in the year before the offense (Selin & Shannon, 2024).

• 24.3% of a forensic homicide sample with psychosis had their first ever mental health contact only after the homicide (Penney et al., 2023).

On disposability, women's version

• Intimate terrorism in former relationships was found to be far more common among women than men (Cunningham & Anderson, 2022). Leaving doesn't end the risk. For a meaningful number of women, it's the trigger.

• Women who become social leaders or step outside the caregiving role face threats specifically designed to force them back into it (Stallone & Zulver, 2024).

• Employed women in urban India face significantly higher violence specifically because they're employed, a documented "male backlash" effect tied to a partner's loss of provider status (Dhanaraj & Mahambare, 2021). Financial independence itself becomes the trigger.

• Over the life course, women experience intimate partner violence at younger ages, higher frequency, more perpetrators, and across more violence types than men, a pattern of gender asymmetry that holds at every age measured (Cunningham & Anderson, 2023).

• Sexual violence increases the risk of sexually transmitted infection by at least 104%, miscarriage or abortion by at least 101%, and major depressive disorder by at least 50% (Stein et al., 2025). These are downstream health consequences most discussions of violence never quantify.

On the psychology underneath the violence

• Witnessing parental violence in childhood is the single strongest predictor of a man's lifetime IPV perpetration across all eight IMAGES countries, stronger than poverty, alcohol, or attitudes (Fleming et al., 2015).

• Military conscription alone was shown to cause men to adopt more sexist attitudes and commit more intimate partner violence, later, via an Argentine draft lottery, a randomized natural experiment, not correlation (Gibbons & Rossi, 2022).

• In Rwanda, boys were explicitly taught combat techniques and expected to defend the country, while girls were assigned household management, with genocide participation itself aligning with these pre-assigned gendered roles of "responsible citizenship" (Applin et al., 2022). The ideology didn't just permit the violence. It was built directly into what boys were raised to believe their role required.

On the paradox that isn't actually a paradox

• Men account for roughly 87% of homicide victims in South Africa (Matzopoulos et al., 2023), while also being the primary perpetrators of nearly all violence, public and private, in virtually every dataset reviewed.

On mental health prevalence, genuinely counterintuitive

• Cross-national data across 29 countries shows men and women have nearly identical lifetime rates of any mental disorder, 28.6% vs 29.8% (McGrath et al., 2023).

• Mild-to-moderate depression is reported more by women, but severe depression and suicide are reported more by men (Shi et al., 2021).

The one that ties the whole thing together, still: an institution, the military, measurably manufactured more sexist attitudes and more domestic violence in ordinary men through conscription alone (Gibbons & Rossi, 2022). Not a belief men arrived with. A belief a system installed, and one of the only findings in this entire set backed by something close to a randomized experiment rather than a survey correlation.

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