This article looks into widespread gender violence that takes the form of systematic killing of married women for dowry. It employs an ecopsychological perspective to consider the society-wide problem of dowry deaths in the Indian subcontinent, reconceptualizing it away from the conventional individuated approach, toward a systemic understanding that helps to reveal a different dimension to the problem. In doing so, it shows that the severely distorted ontological understandings that govern human–nature relationship are analogous to the twisted psychosocial basis of gender relationships. The article rejects the usual division between a “human” problem and an “ecological” problem, and sees both gender atrocities, such as dowry deaths, and human-made ecological ruin as being made possible by parallel pathological communication patterns. The article suggests that normalized aggressiveness within the wider society reduces social systems to widely pathological forms, and argues that systemic healing entails taking into account the common basis of ecopsychopathological attitudes, and consciously recognizing the acute need for transforming the underlying communicational patterns.
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