The Impact of Adjacent Laws on Implementing Violence against Women Laws: Legal Violence in the Lives of Costa Rican Women

Abstract

Most scholarship addressing implementation gaps of violence against women (VAW) laws focuses on countries with high levels of violence in the lives of women-accompanied by weak policing and judicial responses. These studies tend to argue that the most egregious forms of political or social violence explain this gap. However, there has been little attention to countries with lower levels of gender-based violence and relatively responsive state institutions. We analyze the application of VAW laws in Costa Rica, with a focus on the impact of adjacent laws, or laws that are seemingly unrelated to VAW laws but are applied in tandem with and often in conflict with VAW laws. Based on a decade of fieldwork in Costa Rica, we argue that adjacent laws on land, labor, and immigration can be leveraged in ways that undermine the interpretation and implementation of VAW laws. These failures constitute legal violence: the normalized but cumulatively injurious effects of laws that can result in various forms of violence. While legal violence causes implementation gaps in almost every country, our case study reveals that the underlying sociolegal system upon which these laws rest contributes to a significant gap between VAW laws and practice.