“Rich Women Don’t Get Raped”: Capitalism, Class Formation and Wealthy Men’s Violence Towards Women
Empirically I demonstrate how the accumulation of capital and ‘becoming wealthy’ in the Global South, hides certain forms of masculine power and privilege by framing wealthy and educated men as ‘respectable’ and ‘non-violent’. As a consequence middle class and wealthy women who experience violence at the hands of these wealthy men are not believed. Amongst the police, service providers as well as the broader public discourse, only poor men are imagined to be violent men, and poor women are imagined to be the victims of violence. This situation creates paradoxical gendered vulnerabilities for wealthy and middle-class women who have gained upward social and mobility through capital accumulation, but are also rendered vulnerable and invisible due to their class position, with various dangerous tropes about how rich women do not experience violence. A further contribution of this paper is to demonstrate how patriarchal masculine privilege is compounded with class privilege for wealthy and middle class men through capital accumulation. Hence this paper looks at the complex and paradoxical relationship of capital accumulation with patriarchal power, masculine domination as well as questions of men’s gendered violence towards women in transforming economies like India and South Africa.
Methodologically this paper draws on empirical qualitative material from long term fieldwork in New Delhi, India and Johannesburg, South Africa. Qualitative data was collected through ethnographic observations as well as interviews with men and women in India and South Africa from 2020-2022.