Between Power and Patriarchy: Conceptualizing violence against women judges

Women judges around the world face violence that ranges from physical attacks and threats to subtler forms such as harassment, intimidation, and exclusion. Yet despite growing scholarship on violence against women in politics and public life, the judiciary remains largely overlooked. This gap is surprising as courts are male-dominated political institutions, where women judges may be perceived as outsiders challenging gender norms and provoking backlash from those invested in the status quo. Violence against women judges is thus both a symptom of masculinist institutional cultures and a threat to democracy, as it undermines judicial independence, deters women’s participation, and erodes trust in public institutions. The global trend of judicialization of politics has extended judicial authority to politically charged issues, making courts more visible, powerful, and potentially more likely targets of violence from political powerholders, organized crime, and ordinary citizens. Existing research on violence against judges has largely focused on independent judiciaries in established democracies, rarely considering how gender structures exposure to such threats or how institutional weakness amplifies them. While both men and women judges may be targets of violence, it takes on distinctly gendered forms and meanings when directed at women, revealing how power, gender, and authority intersect within the judiciary and the wider political system. This article conceptualizes violence against women judges as a phenomenon shaped by both gendered hierarchies and political contestation. Drawing on literature on judicial (in)dependence, gendered political violence, and our own fieldwork in democratizing states, we argue that women judges face violence from above, within, and below. Violence from above refers to intimidation and attacks by political and economic actors seeking to influence judicial decisions. Violence from within captures gendered power struggles inside the judiciary, including harassment by colleagues and superiors. Violence from below refers to threats and attacks from court users or protesters targeting judges as representatives of unpopular states or decisions. By conceptualizing violence against women judges as both a symptom of patriarchal institutional orders and a threat to democratic governance, our framework broadens the analytical lens on violence against women in decision-making roles.