A GYANINANI CONVERSATION | Series 2 | Part-2 of 11
Violence | Fear |Perception| Agency
Deepali Bhattacharya
In conversation with TD, Clinical Psychologist · An eleven-part reflection, with notes and references
PART II
When Fear Becomes Selective
“Not every act of violence enters the national conscience. That, too, tells us something about ourselves.”
A few years ago, I was sitting with a group of women during a field visit. The discussion had moved from livelihoods to marriage, from marriage to daughters, and almost inevitably, from daughters to dowry.
One woman looked at me and said almost matter-of-factly,
“Madam, every time we hear that another girl has died after marriage, we feel sad. Then life goes on.”
There was no anger in her voice | No surprise | Only acceptance.
That sentence disturbed me more than I admitted at the time.
Not because she lacked compassion. But because violence had become familiar.
Contrast this with what happens after an act of public violence.
A murder inside a train
A terrorist attack
A school shooting
A bomb blast
For days, sometimes weeks, they dominate public conversation. News channels replay the footage. Experts debate motives. Politicians visit families. Security measures are reviewed. People change their routines. The violence enters our collective imagination.
But the violence that unfolds quietly inside homes often follows a different trajectory.
A woman dies after years of abuse.
An elderly parent is assaulted by family members.
A child is repeatedly abused by someone they know.
A young bride is burned for dowry. 4
The grief is devastating.
Yet the public response is often muted.
Why?
This question stayed with me long after my conversation with TD.
I asked him whether our minds respond differently to different forms of violence.
He smiled before answering.
“The human mind is influenced by visibility, proximity and novelty,” he said. 5
“But society adds another layer. It decides which stories are repeatedly told—and which remain confined to private spaces.”
His words made me think of something psychologists have long recognised.
Human beings do not simply respond to events. We respond to how those events are framed, repeated and remembered.
A violent incident that is filmed, replayed and discussed acquires psychological weight far beyond the number of people directly affected. Every replay tells us that this is important. Every headline reinforces its urgency. The story becomes part of our mental landscape.
The violence inside homes rarely follows this path.
It is hidden by walls. Protected by silence.
Wrapped in words like adjustment, family honour, private matter, or these things happen.
Many survivors of domestic violence have told me that the deepest wound was not only the abuse itself.
It was the loneliness of carrying it.
No cameras.
No witnesses.
No hashtags.
No breaking news.
Only another day.
As someone who has worked on gender issues for much of my professional life, I have often wondered whether our public imagination has developed an unequal relationship with violence.
We are startled by the unexpected. We are less disturbed by what repeats.
Not because repeated violence hurts less.
But because familiarity has a strange psychological effect, it slowly erodes our ability to remain shocked. 6
Children growing up in violent homes often begin believing that shouting is normal.
Communities living with caste violence may stop expecting justice.
Women repeatedly exposed to harassment may begin planning their routes around danger rather than questioning why the danger exists.
What begins as adaptation can quietly become acceptance.
Psychology reminds us that human beings are remarkably adaptable. That is one of our greatest strengths.
It is also one of our greatest vulnerabilities because we can adapt not only to kindness-
We can adapt to cruelty.
We can adapt to injustice.
We can even adapt to fear.
And once that happens, violence no longer needs to terrify us.
It only needs to become ordinary!
Perhaps that is why some of the most dangerous forms of violence are not those that explode into public consciousness. They are the ones that disappears into everyday life.
This is not an argument against mourning public tragedies. Every life lost deserves our grief.
Rather, it is an invitation to ask whether our compassion has become uneven.
Why does one death become a national conversation while another remains a family secret?
Why do we remember some victims by name while countless others are remembered only by statistics?
There are no easy answers. But there is an uncomfortable truth.
A society reveals its deepest values not only by what it condemns loudly.
It also reveals them by what it quietly learns to live with.
A QUESTION THAT STAYED WITH ME…
When violence becomes familiar, do we become stronger as a society?
Or do we slowly lose our ability to recognise suffering when it stands quietly beside us?
In the next part, I want to explore another question that emerged from my conversation with TD: Why does deliberate violence disturb us so much more deeply than illness, accidents or natural death?
Notes
1. On indirect, media-based exposure to violence: Holman, Garfin and Silver (2014) found that repeated media exposure to the Boston Marathon bombings was associated with higher acute stress than direct presence at the event — empirical support for the idea that widely broadcast violence is psychologically “experienced” by people far beyond the scene.
2. The mind’s preference for stories over statistics is well documented: the availability heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973) shows that vivid, easily recalled events inflate judgments of risk, and Small and Loewenstein (2003) demonstrate that a single identifiable victim moves people far more than statistical lives.
3. On fear as evolved survival machinery, see LeDoux (1996) on the brain’s ancient threat circuitry.
4. The scale of this quiet violence is documented annually: the National Crime Records Bureau’s Crime in India 2024 recorded 5,737 dowry deaths in that year — roughly sixteen every day — with researchers noting these figures are likely undercounts. NFHS-5 (2019–21) found that around 45% of women and 44% of men considered a husband justified in beating his wife in at least one circumstance — a measure of how far such violence has been normalised.
5. On how repetition and framing confer public importance: agenda-setting research (McCombs & Shaw, 1972) shows that media attention shapes what the public regards as significant, and framing analysis (Entman, 1993) shows that how a story is told shapes what it is understood to mean.
6. Psychology describes this erosion as habituation and “psychic numbing”: Slovic (2007) shows that human feeling fails to scale with repeated or mass suffering — we can remain moved by one story yet grow numb to a pattern.
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