Domestic Peace Deficit: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Gender-Based Violence through Institutional, Relational, and Structural Peace Failures

Gender-based violence (GBV) continues to persist at high levels despite decades of legal reform, policy intervention, and scholarly attention. Existing approaches, drawn from criminology, public health, sociology, psychology, and law, have generated important insights into individual acts, risk factors, and immediate responses. Yet they remain less equipped to explain the cumulative institutional conditions that allow harm within domestic and intimate life to endure across the life course. This paper introduces the Domestic Peace Deficit (DPD) as a conceptual framework that addresses this gap. DPD explains how cumulative institutional failures undermine peace within domestic life by shaping exposure to violence, access to protection, and recognition of harm. Its central contribution is to treat the household as a peace system rather than merely a private social space or a site of interpersonal violence. Drawing on and extending insights from structural violence, positive peace, feminist peace research, human security, the ecological model of GBV, and intersectionality, the framework organises analysis around three pillars: the Violence and Coercion Deficit, the Agency and Relational Peace Deficit, and the Institutional and Structural Support Deficit. The paper defines domestic peace, formalises the deficit concept, outlines core principles, describes how the framework was developed, sketches pathways of accumulation, a future measurement agenda, and states the framework's principal limitations. DPD does not replace existing theories; it integrates and extends them into a coherent architecture centred on the domestic sphere. In doing so, it offers researchers, policymakers, and practitioners a tool for understanding why formal protections so often fail to produce lived safety, and for designing responses that address institutional recognition, accountability, and the intergenerational transmission of harm.