International Journal of Social Science Research (IJSSR)

Exploring Caste category, Education, and Domestic Violence Linkages: Intersectional Perspectives on Women’s Vulnerability in Guntur District of Andhra Pradesh

The study focuses on how caste and education intersect to organize domestic violence in Guntur district, Andhra Pradesh with a sample of 440 women. The findings indicate that backward caste status and high education results in dual disadvantage. Violence Scores of Scheduled Caste women are 18.4 points higher than the General category women and illiterate women score 21.94 points higher than the educated women. An interaction term of factors is significant: illiterate SC women experience 42.3% more violence than the educated women from the General category. Regression results R-squares 47.8 percent of the variations of the violence. The study demonstrates that caste and education have a combined effect on violence and knowledge of rights. Organising binaries of caste oppression and women’s subjugation, it argues, are best addressed through education, feminist interventions and anti-caste strategies to reduce women’s vulnerability and increase their capacity to resist violence.