Interventions promoting collective action have been used to prevent domestic violence, but their mechanisms remain unclear. This paper formalizes feminist theoretical approaches to domestic violence into a game-theoretic model of women's collective action to change gendered social norms and outcomes. It shows that social norms create a social dilemma where individual rationality leads women to abstain from action, but collective action benefits all. Promoting altruism among women can overcome this dilemma. Discouraging tolerance of violence, external punishments for perpetrators, or lowering action costs may not work or backfire. The authors invite researchers to use this framework to understand collective action in domestic violence prevention.

Lu Gram, Rolando Granados, Eva M. Krockow, Nayreen Daruwalla, David Osrin