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.

中文翻译：

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相邻法律对实施暴力侵害妇女法的影响：哥斯达黎加妇女生活中的法律暴力

大多数解决暴力侵害妇女行为 (VAW) 法律实施差距的学术研究都集中在妇女生活中暴力程度高的国家——伴随着执法和司法反应薄弱的国家。这些研究倾向于认为，最恶劣的政治或社会暴力形式可以解释这一差距。然而，很少有人关注基于性别的暴力水平较低且国家机构反应相对较快的国家。我们分析了哥斯达黎加对 VAW 法律的适用情况，重点关注相邻法律或看似与 VAW 法律无关但与 VAW 法律同时适用且经常与 VAW 法律相冲突的法律的影响。根据哥斯达黎加十年的实地考察，我们认为有关土地、劳工、移民可以以破坏对VAW法律的解释和实施的方式加以利用。这些失败构成了法律暴力：法律的正常化但累积的有害影响，可能导致各种形式的暴力。虽然法律暴力在几乎每个国家都会导致实施差距，但我们的案例研究表明，这些法律所依据的基本社会法律制度导致 VAW 法律与实践之间存在重大差距。