Abstract
Until recently, gender-based violence (GBV) has been approached predominantly as a public health concern that
has not received much attention in mainstream social science discourses. Most recent publications on GBV research
implore the necessity for multidisciplinary collaboration and intervention. In spite of multiple global efforts, the
elimination of GBV is not yet visible on the horizon. In this article I draw on Niklas Luhmann’s Social Systems
Theory (SST) to describe GBV as a hyper-complex phenomenon that is communicatively co-constituted through
functional differentiation. I argue that the binary code of each function system creates different symbolic
abbreviations of GBV meanings that inadvertently exclude its victims and enable its incidences. The major objective
of this article is to portray the complexity of GBV and to highlight the need for multidisciplinary social scientific
interventions in an issue that poses a threat to the sustainability of world society.