Violence against women is a historical-cultural phenomenon, the understanding of which requires a comprehensive investigation of all social aspects and layers attached to it as a social phenomenon. Endorsing the problematic nature of violence against women in the Iranian society and recognizing the legitimacy and essentiality of governments’ intervention, the present research investigates the discursive resources of “Preserving Women’s Dignity and Protecting them against Violence” bill.
Aimed at understanding the bill’s dominant implications and meaning patterns, a critical approach is adopted for studying the text of the bill using qualitative content analysis method.
The non-endogenous problematization of violence against women; the inattention to the diversity of habitat and the Iranian field in determining the instances of violence; inattention to the particularities of the Iranian family and inevitabilities of family relationships; and extreme legalization –concentration on measuring new laws– in the absence of cultural normative approaches, are the major implications found in the bill.
Overall, the study of the extracted implications of the bill reveals that the resources available to the discourse of eliminating violence against women lack a social understanding of the problem and, inattentive to the Iranian socio-cultural context and legal structure, presents exclusively forensic solutions to the problem. In other words, rather than endogenizing the problem of violence against women, the discursive resources of the bill simply generalize the global features of the topic to the Iranian society, and instead of referring to the investigation of Iranian women’s experience of violence, they condemn behaviors that have not normally and historically been conceived of as instances of violence against women.