Tolerance on Male Violence as a Global Governance Risk

BOARD MEMO | ADDENDUM

A Note on This Series

This piece continues the Board Memo on the systemic risk of tolerating male violence, published in March 17th, 2026. That memo established the governance argument: that the tolerance of male violence constitutes a structural distortion of governance, with measurable consequences for institutional stability, economic participation and the long-term going concern capacity of societies. It drew on data from Western European and American contexts and set out a framework for board-level action.

That memo can be read in full here:

Source: A Going Concern: Why Boards Must Confront Male Violence

This memo extends the argument globally. It tests whether the governance framework holds when the legal system, the cultural context and the political regime change entirely, and shows that it does. The instrument changes. The logic does not.

The Central Argument

Across every legal system examined in this memo, across every cultural context and every political regime, the same underlying structure appears: male violence against women is tolerated because it produces outcomes that serve existing power arrangements.

In some contexts, the state is the perpetrator, enacting and enforcing male violence through law and decree. In others, the state shields perpetrators from accountability through legal frameworks that excuse or reduce punishment for violence committed in the name of honour, family or cultural tradition. In others still, the state is a bystander, failing to intervene with sufficient force or consistency to disrupt practices that have become self-reinforcing across generations.

The taxonomy matters because it prevents this analysis from reading as a simple catalogue of horrors. It is not. It is a governance analysis of the same phenomenon operating through different institutional architectures. And it leads to the same governance conclusion: systems that permit male violence to produce outcomes will reproduce that permission across generations, until the cost of tolerance becomes structurally unsustainable.

Via and Kratos. Where force is not constrained by legitimate authority, it becomes the authority.

CATEGORY I: THE STATE AS PERPETRATOR

In the most extreme cases, the state itself enacts and enforces male violence. It does not merely tolerate a parallel system of power; it is that system. Force is not constrained by legitimate authority. It has become the authority.

1. Afghanistan: Gender Apartheid as Governance Architecture

Since the Taliban's return to power in August 2021, Afghanistan has undergone the most rapid and comprehensive rollback of women's rights in modern history. The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan has described it as an unprecedented deterioration. The UN Secretary-General has used the term gender apartheid. The Taliban have issued over one hundred decrees and edicts targeting the twenty million women and girls who constitute just under half of Afghanistan's population.

These decrees are not a series of isolated restrictions. They constitute a governance architecture: a systematic and punitive dismantling of women's presence in public, economic, legal and educational life. Girls have been banned from secondary and university education. Women have been prohibited from working in most sectors, including for NGOs and United Nations agencies. Freedom of movement requires a male guardian. Women's voices are banned from public spaces. Windows through which women might see the street from inside their homes have been ordered removed. The Ministry of Women's Affairs was abolished on the first day of Taliban rule and replaced with a Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.

In governance terms, what the Taliban have constructed is not a society with a poor human rights record. It is a society in which half the population has been erased from institutional life by deliberate architectural design. The mechanism is not violence alone; it is the systematic use of the threat of violence, enforced by the state’s security apparatus, to produce permanent behavioural compliance. This is Via displacing Kratos entirely.

The health consequences of this governance architecture are already measurable and will compound. Afghanistan’s maternal mortality ratio was estimated at 638 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2024, among the highest in Asia and nearly three times the global average. Those deaths were the baseline before the Taliban’s December 2024 ban on women attending midwifery, nursing and medical training institutes, which affected approximately 45,000 female students. The UNFPA had already estimated that Afghanistan urgently needed at least 18,000 additional midwives. OCHA has warned that the ban will likely have catastrophic consequences for maternal and newborn mortality. Humanitarian partners project an additional 1,600 maternal deaths and 3,500 infant deaths as a direct consequence.

The mechanism is precise. Cultural and religious norms enforced under Taliban rule mean that male doctors cannot examine female patients without a male relative present; many families will not permit it regardless. The removal of female medical professionals from the healthcare system therefore does not reduce abstract healthcare capacity. It creates a medically unserved population of women and girls who require clinical care they cannot access. As one midwifery trainer put it: “In a society where women’s education is banned and future doctors cannot be trained, how could there not be a lack of female healthcare providers, and how could mothers not die?”

The consequences extend to the next generation. Afghanistan has a young and rapidly growing population. Removing women from education, healthcare, economic participation and civic life simultaneously does not only harm those currently alive. It degrades the human capital, health infrastructure and social cohesion available to children not yet born. A governance system that produces foreseeable, preventable, population-level mortality in half its citizens as a direct result of deliberate policy choices is not simply failing at governance. It is deploying governance as an instrument of harm.

Taliban officials travel internationally and attend high-level meetings. Russia formally recognised the Taliban government in July 2025. A 2024 UN process in Doha excluded Afghan women from the table entirely while seeking Taliban attendance. Human Rights Watch has noted that the walls closed in on women and girls while the rest of the world seemed to move on.

Afghanistan ranked lowest of 177 countries in the 2023 and 2024 Women, Peace and Security Index. The economic consequence is direct: estimated gross national income per capita in Afghanistan is USD 533 for women and USD 3,089 for men. Half the population has been rendered economically inactive by governance decree.

Sources: UN Women: Afghanistan Gender Profile 2024 | Human Rights Watch: Gender Apartheid as an International Crime | CFR: How the Taliban’s Rule is Fuelling the Movement to End Gender Apartheid | The Lancet: Let Afghan Women Work, Maternal Health Depends on It | OCHA: Afghanistan Humanitarian Update, December 2024 | OHCHR: Afghanistan Ban on Women Medical Training Must Be Repealed

CATEGORY II: THE STATE AS PROTECTOR OF PERPETRATORS

In the second category, the state does not itself commit the violence. Instead, its legal framework actively shields those who do. The law reduces or removes punishment for men who kill women in the name of honour, family or suspicion of infidelity. The state does not mandate the killing; it simply ensures that those who kill face few consequences. The effect on behaviour is the same.

2. Iran: Legal Impunity and the Architecture of Femicide

Iran presents one of the most documented cases of state-provided legal impunity for male violence. Under Iran's Islamic Penal Code, the legal framework creates explicit protections for male perpetrators of femicide in specific circumstances. Article 301 exempts fathers and paternal grandfathers from the most severe punishments for killing their children or grandchildren. Article 630 exempts husbands from punishment for killing their wives if they witness their wives in an act of adultery. Article 302 reduces punishment if the victim had allegedly committed an offence punishable under the law. The effect is that a significant proportion of femicide cases in Iran are tried not as murder but as matters of honour or family dispute, with sentencing reflecting that diminished legal gravity.

The consequences are visible in the data. Rights organisations documented 149 known femicides in Iran in 2023, rising to 165 in 2024, representing an average of one woman killed every other day. In the first half of 2025, 104 cases were already recorded. These figures are acknowledged by all analysts to be significant undercounts; murders are frequently misreported as suicides, accidents or family disputes, and the patriarchal family unit controls the flow of information. Iran's own state officials have estimated that around 10 per cent of the country's murders are honour killings, and between 375 and 450 honour killings may occur annually.

Iran has no domestic violence law. A comprehensive bill for the protection of women against violence has been debated in parliament for over fourteen years; in June 2025, the government withdrew it. Women who survive violence, or who kill a male family member in self-defence, frequently face prosecution themselves. Iran executed 31 women in 2024, the UN noted, many of whom had been convicted of murder arising from circumstances of domestic violence, child marriage or forced marriage.

The governance argument here is stark: when the law does not merely fail to protect women but actively protects those who kill them, the state has become a participant in the tolerance structure. The legal system is not failing. It is functioning exactly as designed.

Sources: Center for Human Rights in Iran: Killed Because You Are a Woman | UK Home Office Country Policy Note: Honour-Based Violence in Iran | RFE/RL: One Woman Killed Every Other Day in Iran in 2024

3. Honour Killings: The Middle East, South Asia and the Global Reach of a Permission Structure

Honour killings are not confined to any single country, religion or culture. They occur across the Middle East, South Asia, parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and within diaspora communities in Western Europe, North America and Australia. The UNFPA estimates that up to 5,000 women and girls are killed annually in the name of honour; some researchers and NGOs consider this figure a significant undercount, with estimates reaching as high as 20,000.

Pakistan documents the highest absolute numbers. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan recorded 490 honour killing incidents in 2023. In the period between 1998 and 2003, over 4,000 honour crimes were reported to Pakistani courts. In 2016, Pakistan repealed a loophole that had allowed perpetrators to be legally pardoned by other family members, an acknowledgement that the legal system had itself been a mechanism of impunity. The extra-legal power of jirgas and tribal councils continues to operate parallel justice systems that sanction violence against women with effective impunity, despite Supreme Court rulings declaring this contrary to Pakistan's international obligations.

In Jordan, Article 340 of the Penal Code has historically exempted from punishment those who kill female relatives found guilty of adultery, and Article 76 has allowed defendants to cite mitigating reasons in assault cases. Efforts to amend these provisions have repeatedly stalled under social pressure. In Jordan, 28 per cent of surveyed adults reported personally knowing a victim of an honour killing.

In eight countries in the Middle East and North Africa region, including Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and the Palestinian territories, legislation provides or has provided leniency specifically for honour-based femicides. Research has found that where such laws exist, community support for honour norms is significantly stronger; the law signals to the community what behaviour the state will tolerate.

This is the incentive architecture argument from Memo 1 operating at legislative scale. When the law reduces the cost of killing a woman who has brought dishonour, more women are killed. The mechanism is not irrational. It is structurally predictable.

Sources: UNFPA: Honour Killings FAQ | Dawn: Honour Killings in Pakistan 2024 | Britannica: Honour Killings Case Study: The Assassination of Yanar Mohammed

On 2 March 2026, two armed men on a motorcycle opened fire outside the Baghdad home of Yanar Mohammed, co-founder and president of the Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq. She was 65. She died of her wounds in hospital the same day.

Mohammed had spent more than two decades building precisely the institutional infrastructure that the governance argument in this memo describes as necessary. She founded Iraq’s first women’s shelter in 2003, in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, and built a network of safe houses across multiple Iraqi cities that sheltered more than 1,300 women fleeing honour killings, domestic violence and trafficking. She published a feminist newspaper. She ran training programmes for women’s rights activists. She continued her work despite over two decades of death threats, restrictions on her movement and sustained smear campaigns designed to discredit and endanger her.

The day before she was killed, she had participated in a conference in Baghdad on sex trafficking and accountability for crimes committed against women by ISIS. No group has claimed responsibility for her murder. The Iraqi Prime Minister ordered an investigation. It has not yet produced results.

Her killing is not separable from the environment that permitted it. In Iraq, data show a documented pattern of targeted assassinations of activists, journalists and human rights defenders that intensified following the Tishreen protests of 2019. Amnesty International described her killing as a calculated assault to stifle human rights defenders. Human Rights Watch noted that the persistent failure of Iraqi authorities to hold perpetrators accountable for past assassinations has entrenched a climate of impunity that continues to place activists at grave and fatal risk. That impunity is not incidental but structural. It is, in the precise language of this series, a tolerance structure.

The tolerance of male violence, when extended to those who challenge it, becomes a weapon of institutional silence. The message it sends is precise: speak, and the system will not protect you. When that message goes unanswered over years and decades, it shapes who will and will not enter the space of advocacy. It shapes what is possible. It shapes what women do and do not say.

Gisèle Pelicot wanted society to be a witness. Yanar Mohammed spent twenty years building the structures that would make witnessing possible. She was killed for it, in a country where the state had already demonstrated it would not hold her killers to account.

Sources: Amnesty International | Human Rights Watch | Front Line Defenders | Middle East Eye

Greece and the tolerance structure within the European Union

Greece presents a case within the European Union itself. Under Article 299 §2 of the Greek Penal Code, intentional homicide carried out in a state of βρασµός ψυχικής ορµής (a momentary emotional surge, typically rendered in English as a crime of passion) is treated as a significantly lesser offence than premeditated murder. The sentence is reduced from mandatory life imprisonment to a temporary sentence, potentially as low as five years. Combined with mitigating circumstances under Article 84, including being deemed to have been provoked by the victim’s behaviour or to have led a previously law-abiding life, a sentence can fall to as little as one to eight years.

The logic encoded here is distinct from that of honour killings or state-sanctioned femicide. It does not invoke family structure, tribal authority or religious doctrine. It invokes emotion. Specifically, it invokes the emotional state of a man who kills the woman he claims to love. Jealousy, possessiveness, the inability to accept that a woman may leave: these are framed not as aggravating factors but as circumstances that reduce moral culpability. The law, in effect, treats intimate male violence as something closer to a medical event than a criminal choice.

Femicide is not recognised in the Greek penal code as a distinct crime or as an aggravating circumstance. This matters in practice. In 2021, following a series of high-profile femicides, a police trade unionist stated publicly on Greek television that if a perpetrator had immediately called police and presented his act as a momentary lapse of reason, he could have received under four years. Campaigners described this as an instruction to future perpetrators. The statement illustrates precisely what the governance argument in this series calls an incentive architecture: the law does not mandate the killing of women, but it reduces the cost of doing so, provided the killer frames it correctly.

On 1 April 2024, 28-year-old Kyriaki Griva was stabbed to death outside a police station in Athens, the same station where she had sought protection from her ex-partner minutes earlier. She was the fifth woman killed by a partner in Greece that year. Greece has been identified across multiple sources as having the highest rate of femicide in Europe. In July 2025, her killer was sentenced to life imprisonment in what was described as a landmark ruling precisely because the court rejected the βρασµός ψυχικής ορµής defence and the defendant’s claim of diminished responsibility. That a court’s refusal to apply an existing legal provision is considered landmark indicates how routinely that provision has been applied before.

The tolerance structure here is not cultural tradition enforced by tribal councils. It is an EU member state’s penal code, as drafted, in force and applied by its courts.

Sources: Lawspot: Article 299 Greek Penal Code | Equality Law: Alarming Rise of Intimate Femicides in Greece | Al Jazeera: How Often Will This Keep Happening | Athens Times: Key Judicial Cases of 2025

Accountability is the antidote to tolerance.

CATEGORY III: THE STATE AS BYSTANDER

In the third category, the state neither enacts nor explicitly protects male violence. Instead, practices are sustained by deep social norms that the state fails to challenge with sufficient force or consistency. The violence is not mandated. It is permitted by silence, by under-enforcement, by the absence of investment in the institutional infrastructure that would be required to shift the norm. This category encompasses some of the largest-scale practices in this memo.

4. Female Genital Mutilation: The Self-Reinforcing Norm

More than 230 million girls and women alive today have undergone female genital mutilation. This figure, published by UNICEF in March 2024, represents a 15 per cent increase of 30 million survivors compared to estimates from eight years earlier. Approximately 4.4 million girls are at risk of the practice annually. The global pace of decline would need to be 27 times faster than current trends to meet the Sustainable Development Goal of ending the practice by 2030.

FGM is practised across 31 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, with the largest concentration in sub-Saharan Africa, accounting for 144 million of the total. In some countries, including Guinea, Somalia and Mali, prevalence rates exceed 80 to 90 per cent of the female population. Four in ten survivors live in fragile or conflict-affected settings. A worrying recent trend identified by UNICEF is that more girls are subjected to the practice at younger ages, many before their fifth birthday.

FGM has no medical justification. It causes severe and irreversible harm, including bleeding, infection, complications in childbirth and increased risk of maternal and newborn mortality. The health system costs of treating its consequences are estimated at USD 1.4 billion per year globally.

The governance argument for understanding FGM as a systemic risk rather than a cultural practice is captured in how the practice is sustained. Where FGM is a social norm, the social pressure to conform is the primary driver. Communities perpetuate it not because individuals uniformly endorse the harm, but because the social cost of deviation is prohibitive. Families that do not subject daughters to the practice face stigma, rejection and reduced marriage prospects for their children. Around 400 million people in FGM-practising countries are estimated to oppose the practice; the norm persists because no individual family can unilaterally exit without bearing a disproportionate cost.

This is precisely the incentive architecture dynamic described in my previous Board Memo. The tolerance structure does not require conscious endorsement. It requires only that the cost of non-compliance with the norm remains higher than the cost of perpetuating it. Changing that architecture requires sustained state investment in norm-shifting programmes, legal enforcement and the economic empowerment of women and girls. Without that investment, the bystander state becomes, in effect, an enabler.

Sources: UNICEF: Over 230 Million Girls and Women Subjected to FGM (2024) | WHO: Female Genital Mutilation Fact Sheet | UNFPA: FGM Frequently Asked Questions

5. Child Marriage: Structural Violence by Design

An estimated 650 million girls and women alive today were married before their eighteenth birthday. Globally, 12 million girls are married in childhood every year. South Asia holds the largest share of this burden, followed by sub-Saharan Africa, where rates are declining more slowly and where the absolute numbers are rising with population growth. In Latin America and the Caribbean, there has been no measurable progress in 25 years.

Child marriage is a form of gender-based violence operating through institutional permission rather than direct physical force. It removes girls from education, exposes them to early pregnancy and associated health risks, places them in unequal power relationships with significantly older male partners, and severely constrains their economic and social autonomy for the remainder of their lives. Girls married in childhood are at substantially elevated risk of domestic violence and sexual coercion within marriage. In the ten countries with the highest child marriage rates, girls are married to men an average of seven to ten years older.

As a systemic risk, child marriage operates through the same logic as FGM: it is sustained by a combination of economic incentives, social norms and the absence of alternatives. In the poorest households, marriage is perceived as securing a daughter's future and reducing a family's economic burden. Girls' education, where accessible, is the single most effective protective factor. The World Bank has found that in 105 of 110 countries with data, child marriage rates are significantly higher among girls from the poorest households than the richest.

The relationship between child marriage and broader tolerance of male violence is direct and measurable. Child marriage normalises male authority over female bodies and reproductive choices from the earliest age. It is, in structural terms, the formalisation of that authority through the legal institution of marriage, often before girls have the cognitive or social capacity to consent in any meaningful sense.

Sources: UNICEF: Child Marriage Data | World Bank: The Persistent Challenge of Child Marriage

6. Conflict-Related Sexual Violence: DRC, Sudan and the Weaponisation of Bodies

When male violence is used deliberately and systematically as a tactic of war, it ceases to be merely a social or cultural phenomenon. It becomes a weapon of governance: a means of destabilising communities, displacing populations, destroying social cohesion and asserting territorial and ethnic dominance through the bodies of women and girls.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Médecins Sans Frontières treated over 25,000 victims and survivors of sexual violence in 2024 alone, representing more than two people every hour. In September 2024, 80 per cent of displaced women in camps had reportedly suffered rape. The DRC has been identified as the country with the highest verified cases of conflict-related sexual violence in the UN Secretary-General's annual reports for multiple consecutive years.

In Sudan, where conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces has created what the United Nations describes as the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, the documented use of sexual violence as a weapon of war is systematic and well-evidenced. The number of people at risk of sexual and gender-based violence in Sudan more than tripled in under two years to 12.1 million. The UN Independent Fact-Finding Mission found reasonable grounds to believe that rape, gang rape, sexual slavery and enforced marriage committed by the RSF and its allied militias constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity. Children as young as one year old have been documented among victims.

Globally, the UN Secretary-General's 2025 report on conflict-related sexual violence documented over 4,600 verified cases in 2024, a 25 per cent increase on the previous year, across 21 countries. Women and girls constituted 92 per cent of verified victims. These figures, the report explicitly acknowledged, represent only a fraction of the actual scale; stigma, fear of reprisal, displacement and the destruction of reporting infrastructure mean the vast majority of cases are never recorded.

The governance argument here is not merely about accountability for individual perpetrators, though that accountability is essential and the work of the ICC in establishing individual criminal responsibility for sexual violence in conflict is significant. The deeper governance argument is about what happens when impunity for sexual violence becomes a structural feature of conflict: it signals to armed groups, to communities and to states that the bodies of women can be used as terrain of war without meaningful consequence. That signal replicates, compounding the tolerance structure across generations of conflict.

Sources: UN: Conflict-Related Sexual Violence Rose Sharply in 2024 | OHCHR: Sudan Fact-Finding Mission on Sexual Violence | EEAS: DRC and Sudan, Speech by HR/VP Kallas

7. Rape as a Weapon of War: The International Criminal Court and the Accountability Gap

The recognition of rape and sexual violence as war crimes and crimes against humanity under international law represents one of the most significant developments in international governance since the 1990s. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda established foundational precedents. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court codified rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy and other forms of sexual violence as crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The ICC has issued arrest warrants in relation to sexual violence in Sudan and the DRC, among other situations. In 2024 the ICC Deputy Prosecutor told the UN Security Council there were reasonable grounds to believe war crimes and crimes against humanity, including targeted sexual violence, were being committed in Darfur. The pending trial of Ali Kushayb for charges related to Darfur was described as a milestone for accountability.

However, the accountability gap remains vast. The UN's own reports note that over 70 per cent of parties listed as responsible for conflict-related sexual violence are repeat offenders, appearing in the annex for five or more consecutive years without implementing preventive measures. The ICC faces obstruction, under-funding, limited cooperation from states and persistent difficulties securing arrests. The message this sends is not neutral: it tells armed groups that the probability of accountability for sexual violence remains low, and that the weapon is therefore likely to remain cheap to use relative to its tactical value.

For boards and governance practitioners, the ICC dimension raises a specific institutional question. Organisations operating in conflict-affected environments, or sourcing from supply chains in such environments, increasingly face obligations to conduct human rights due diligence that encompasses conflict-related sexual violence risk. The emerging regulatory frameworks on corporate responsibility and supply chain transparency are moving in this direction. The governance case for engaging with this risk proactively, rather than reactively, is the same as for all systemic risk: the cost of early action is lower than the cost of managing consequences.

Sources: Georgetown GIWPS: UN Secretary-General Report on Conflict-Related Sexual Violence 2025 | DefenceWeb: ICC on Sexual Violence as Weapon of War in Darfur

The Governance Conclusion

In this addendurm to my previous Board Memo, I have examined seven manifestations of the systemic tolerance of male violence across three analytical categories, seven legal systems, multiple cultural contexts and every major global region. The cases are different in their instruments, their scale, their legal architecture and their cultural origins.

The governance structure is the same in every case.

In each context, male violence or the threat of it is permitted to produce outcomes that serve existing power arrangements. In each context, the tolerance structure is maintained by an architecture of incentives, sanctions and silences that makes the cost of non-compliance higher than the cost of perpetuation. In each context, institutions, whether states, legal systems, community councils or international bodies, play a role in sustaining that architecture, either through active participation, through the provision of legal impunity, or through insufficient intervention.

The civilisational argument from Memo 1 therefore holds globally. Via does not require a specific culture or legal tradition to displace Kratos. It requires only that the systems of legitimate authority fail to constrain it consistently and at cost to those who deploy it.

The tolerance of male violence is not a series of discrete regional problems requiring local solutions. It is a systemic global risk requiring a governance response proportionate to its scale.

The instrument changes. The logic does not. And the cost is always borne by those least able to prevent it.

Governance Framework and Recommendations

The governance framework for how boards, regulators and institutions can respond to this risk, including the What Good Governance Looks Like section, the analysis of SLAPPs as a tool of institutional silence, and the Men as Stakeholders argument, is set out in full in:

Source: Board Memo 1: A Going Concern, Why Boards Must Confront Male Violence