Power, Gender and Violence in Human Systems
Power, gender, and violence are usually treated as separate topics in public conversation. In practice, they run along the same structure. The same mechanism that determines who gets to speak in a meeting also shapes whose account is believed when something has happened, and who carries the shame when it surfaces.
Pierre Bourdieu called this symbolic power: power that operates through the participation of those subject to it. Symbolic power does not look like power. It looks like the way things are. That is precisely what makes it hard to see and hard to challenge.
Emergent Reality works at this layer. It does not address individual cases. It surfaces the structure that produces cases again and again.
What the data show
The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights' large-scale survey (FRA 2014) found that approximately one in three women in the EU has experienced physical or sexual violence since the age of fifteen. The newer EU-wide survey published in 2024 (Eurostat, FRA & EIGE 2024), based on more than 114,000 interviews, confirmed the order of magnitude and brought into view the scale of psychological, economic, and digital violence as well. The World Health Organization (WHO 2021) reaches a similar conclusion globally: roughly one in three women has experienced physical or sexual violence in her lifetime.
Three levels are easily confused and worth keeping distinct: the prevalence of violence, its reporting, and its institutional recognition. High numbers in any given country may indicate genuine prevalence, better reporting, or both.
In the Nordic countries, the figures are higher, not lower. This is known as the Nordic Paradox (Gracia & Merlo 2016): the countries that score highest on gender equality indicators report more intimate partner violence than, for example, Southern European countries. The explanation is not simple. The research literature offers several parallel accounts: measurement and reporting culture, differences in how violence is defined, alcohol use, and the possibility that the rhetoric of equality conceals structures that have not yet been dismantled. There is no single explanation.
The point is this: a high score on equality metrics does not mean that violence has ended. It means that equality has advanced in certain layers. Other layers remain.
Six perspectives
- Coercive control and the narrowing of agency — Violence does not always appear as an event. It can appear as a structure in which another person's range of movement, money, social ties, and self-confidence narrow gradually. Evan Stark has described this as coercive control, and in many countries it is now part of criminal law.
- Victim credibility and the wrong kind of victim — Nils Christie's classic analysis of the "ideal victim" shows that credibility is not distributed only on the basis of what happened. It is also shaped by who tells the story and how well that person fits the listener's image of a credible victim. In the helping professions, this plays out daily.
- Organizational silence around harm — Morrison and Milliken described in 2000 a phenomenon in which members of an organization know that something is wrong but no one names it. Silence is not an absence of information. It is a shared agreement about what is not spoken.
- Glass ceilings and glass cliffs — Women are not blocked from advancement in one way but in many. When they do advance, they are often placed in roles where the probability of failure is unusually high. Ryan and Haslam named this the glass cliff.
- Distortions in the use of power — The experience of holding power changes behavior in recurring ways. Research by Keltner and colleagues shows that power can reduce empathic accuracy, increase risk-taking, and weaken the ability to read others' emotional states. This is not a moral characteristic. It is a structural effect.
Closely related blog essay
What Emergent Reality does in this work
Emergent Reality is Kaisa Vaittinen's practice in which presence in the room brings to the surface dynamics that ordinary meeting conventions cover over. The work is bounded: it makes visible. The processing happens afterwards, and belongs to an organizational psychologist, supervisor, coach, or other appropriate professional.
This boundary matters especially in themes involving violence, harassment, and the use of power. In those areas, careless intervention can do harm.
Safety boundary
If you are in immediate danger, contact emergency services or a local crisis service. Emergent Reality does not provide crisis support, therapy, investigation, legal advice, HR process, safeguarding, or victim advocacy. The work described here concerns organizational and relational dynamics at the level of visibility, reflection, and responsible follow-up.
Sources
- Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and Symbolic Power. Harvard University Press.
- European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (2014). Violence against women: an EU-wide survey. Publications Office of the European Union.
- Eurostat, FRA & EIGE (2024). EU gender-based violence survey – key results. Publications Office of the European Union.
- Gracia, E. & Merlo, J. (2016). Intimate partner violence against women and the Nordic paradox. Social Science & Medicine, 157, 27–30.
- Keltner, D., Gruenfeld, D. H. & Anderson, C. (2003). Power, approach, and inhibition. Psychological Review, 110(2), 265–284.
- World Health Organization (2021). Violence against women prevalence estimates, 2018. WHO.