Domestic violence

To describe violence that takes place behind closed doors as a “private misfortune” is to grant it refuge from scrutiny; to label it lawfully minor is to deprive its survivors of remedy. In Kazakhstan the contours of domestic violence against women have long been shaped by this double shelter – cultural norms that confine family matters to the private sphere, and legal arrangements that until recently treated many forms of intimate partner abuse as administrative rather than criminal offences. National survey work collected and synthesized by UN Women shows that roughly 16–17 percent of women aged 18–75 who have ever had a partner report having experienced physical and/or sexual violence by that partner, a figure that places Kazakhstan well within the global pattern where intimate partner violence is common though often under-reported.  That prevalence, however, coexists with an official apparatus that until the mid-2020s often failed to respond: the Interior Ministry and human-rights monitors documented more than 100,000 domestic-violence complaints to police in recent years, and dozens of deaths linked to family violence have periodically galvanised public outrage.

Explaining why such abuse endures requires attention to both law and social practice. In 2017, in a policy move that many observers later described as a mistake, Kazakhstan reclassified many acts of domestic battery from criminal to administrative offences – a change explained by some officials as a way to curb prison populations but which critics warned would reduce deterrence and foster impunity.  That statutory downgrading mattered in concrete ways: police frequently treated complaints as matters to be mediated rather than investigated, encouraged reconciliation, and failed to inform survivors about protection orders, shelters or legal aid. These institutional responses reflected and reinforced wider social arrangements – patriarchal expectations that prioritize family “harmony,” economic dependency that constrains escape, and stigma that deters disclosure. Human Rights Watch and other rights organisations repeatedly documented how these patterns combine to turn the criminal justice system into a mechanism that often reproduces victims’ vulnerability rather than alleviating it.

The legal narrative took an abrupt and politically visible turn in 2024. High-profile cases – most notably the murder and trial that became known around the name Saltanat Nukenova and that prompted a national outcry – helped concentrate attention on how the law had been failing survivors. Mass protests and a sustained advocacy push created the conditions under which President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev signed a package of amendments in April 2024 that effectively re-criminalised battery and light bodily harm in family settings and closed certain procedural loopholes, such as blanket reliance on reconciliation to dismiss repeat offences. International legal observers and the Law Library of Congress catalogued the change as a significant reversal of the earlier decriminalisation; human-rights groups described the legislation as a necessary but incomplete step.  The palpable result was immediate: early monitoring suggested a measurable increase in investigations and, in the first months after the law’s enactment, a reduction in reported incidents in some datasets – a promising sign that law reform can alter behaviour when backed by enforcement.

Still, law on the page is not the same as law in practice, and a sober assessment must attend to the persistent gaps that policy changes alone cannot fill. Enforcement has remained uneven across Kazakhstan’s regions; training for police, prosecutors and judges has been insufficiently systematic; and services for survivors – emergency shelters, confidential hotlines, sustained psychological treatment and economic reintegration programmes – remain patchy and heavily reliant on civil-society organisations rather than stable state financing. UN agencies and the UN Country Team have documented progress in establishing crisis centres and piloting multisectoral responses, but they also note that the reach and sustainability of such services are limited without long-term budgetary commitments and institutional coordination. The aggregated effect is one the literature often emphasises: criminalisation reduces impunity only when accompanied by a predictable ecosystem of protection, reporting, and social services.

Equally vital is the cultural terrain in which these legal reforms must operate. Shifts in statutory language do not automatically dissolve the gendered norms that render violence tolerable or invisible. Interviews and survey evidence collected by researchers and non-governmental actors indicate that many women continue to fear reporting because of concern for children’s material welfare, anticipated social ostracism, or direct threats of reprisal; men who perpetrate abuse often act within a framework of entitlement reinforced by family and community expectations. Addressing these normative drivers requires a different toolkit: public education campaigns that translate rights into intelligible practices; school-based curricula that teach non-violent conflict resolution and gender equality from early ages; community dialogues that engage religious and local leaders in reframing masculinity and caregiving; and economic policies that expand women’s autonomy through employment and social protection. In other words, prevention is as much about social engineering as it is about penal deterrence.

Lastly, effective policy should be measured by its ability to protect the vulnerable and to transform power asymmetries rather than merely to punish offenders. Kazakhstan’s new measures are important precisely because they recognise that intimate partner violence is not an incidental family quarrel but a structural harm requiring public remedy. Yet long-term effectiveness will hinge on three linked capacities: first, the consistent application of criminal-justice procedures everywhere in the country, buttressed by specialized training and accountability mechanisms that prevent policing from reverting to informal mediation; second, a predictable and funded network of social services that offers survivors safe exit paths and socio-economic rehabilitation; and third, a sustained cultural programme – schools, media, and community institutions – that reworks gender norms and makes reporting socially feasible rather than costly. International partners and domestic NGOs can and should support these moves, but the ultimate burden is political: the steady appropriation of public resources and administrative attention to an issue that was once dismissed as personal.

If the lesson from recent years is mixed, it is because progress in Kazakhstan is both demonstrable and fragile. Legislative reform in 2024 reopened a space for accountability that had been closed by earlier policy choices, and that reopening matters. Yet history – and the available evidence – cautions against triumphant narratives. Ending domestic violence will not be the tidy product of a single statute or a headline case. It will be the cumulative outcome of legal clarity enforced with consistency, of services that make leaving possible, and of a cultural shift that redefines dignity and safety for women as public goods rather than private burdens. Only such a comprehensive recalibration can turn a juridical reversal into lasting social change