Structural Injustice, Collective Inaction: Insights from a Field Experiment to Address Violence Against Women in Urban India

Community mobilisation efforts to prevent violence against women (VAW) in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are often premised on the idea that raising awareness of structural gender inequality motivates collective action. Experimental evidence for this assumption in LMICs remains scarce. We conducted a randomized field experiment with 720 women in informal settlements in Mumbai, India, embedded within the larger SNEHA-TARA trial of community mobilisation, which combined regular local group meetings of women, men, and adolescents with volunteer training over a three-to-four-year period. In our field experiment, participants were randomly assigned to one of three 30-45 minutes reflective sessions: on structural injustice, types of violence (control 1), or child nutrition (control 2). In the session on structural injustice, we used a game to stimulate discussion and reflection on gender inequality and its connection to VAW. We measured participant performance of three real-time collective action behaviours addressing VAW: contribution of a face photo to a poster campaign, contribution of a hand photo to the same campaign, or discussing VAW with a neighbour. Despite increasing recognition of gender inequality as a cause of VAW, the structural injustice session had no statistically significant impact on collective action relative to controls. By contrast, participation in NGO-led groups and volunteering was strongly associated with action, mediated by perceived efficacy and activist identity. Our findings challenge the assumption that awareness of injustice alone is sufficient to spark collective action and suggest the importance of fostering community identity and self-efficacy in mobilisation programmes. In contexts of entrenched patriarchy and normalisation of VAW, merely recognising injustice may be insufficient to catalyse collective action.