Domestic violence is a global phenomenon impacting countless lives. However, most research on the topic is anchored in the Global North. Using South Asia as a case study, we encourage further development of intersectional, comparative research. Such work brings us closer to understanding shared and divergent causes, patterns, and impacts of domestic violence within and across societies. The tendency to treat South Asia monolithically erases nuanced understandings of domestic violence and reduces South Asian women to victims. Our context-specific explorations highlight how marriage, religion and global processes reveal theoretically meaningful variations in women’s experiences of domestic violence.

Objectives: We provide new insights about the role of gender, race, and place in perceived risk and fear of crime and discuss the possible boundaries of the shadow of sexual assault thesis, which attributes women’s higher levels of fear to their underlying fear of rape across a variety of ecological contexts. Method: Analyses are based on data from in-depth qualitative interviews with 34 undergraduates attending a diverse urban university in a highly disadvantaged community in the northeast. Purposive and theoretical sampling strategies were used, and thematic saturation was achieved. Results: We find striking gender similarities in students’ perceptions of risk and fear of crime in this particular context. Specifically, both women and men drew on their perceptions of disorder in the community when defining the threat of victimization, which they believed was robbery committed by the city’s African American male residents. Conclusions: The gendered shadow of sexual assault was surprisingly absent from students’ discussions, suggesting that it may not be as universal across context as previous research suggests. We argue that microlevel contexts and methodological factors may shape the shadow’s presence, nature, and strength in gendered fear and perceived risk.

This study considers whether societal gender inequality moderates the relationship between gender and perceptions of personal safety. Pooled 1992–2005 rounds of the International Crime Victims Survey, comprising more than 285,000 respondents from 75 countries, are used to estimate multilevel models of safety perceptions, with a cross-level interaction specified between gender and gender inequality. We find that the gender gap in safety perceptions, although statistically significant in all countries, is largest in countries exhibiting high gender equality and smallest in countries with high gender inequality. This is explained entirely by variation in men’s safety perceptions; male respondents perceive themselves as safer in a milieu of gender equality, but less safe in a milieu of gender inequality. In contrast, the safety perceptions of female respondents are uncorrelated with societal gender inequality.