A GYANINANI CONVERSATION | Series 2 | Part-1 of 11
Violence | Fear |Perception| Agency
Deepali Bhattacharya
In conversation with TD, Clinical Psychologist · An eleven-part reflection, with notes and references
PART I
When Violence Travels Beyond the Victim
“Violence does not end where it happens. Sometimes it begins there.”
There are some news stories that disappear by the next morning.
And then some stories refuse to leave us.
A few days ago, a man was murdered inside a crowded local train. The argument was ordinary. The violence was not. Within hours, the footage was everywhere. It appeared on television screens, WhatsApp groups, social media feeds and dinner-table conversations. Friends called one another to ask, “Did you see what happened?” Parents told their children to be careful while travelling. Office colleagues discussed whether local trains had become unsafe. For many people, the next morning’s commute felt different. The train had not changed. The city had not changed. Yet something inside us had.
The victim had died in one compartment.
But fear had boarded every compartment.
That image stayed with me—not because it was the first act of violence India had witnessed, but because of the speed with which it entered our collective imagination. I found myself asking a question that I have often carried back from the field after meeting survivors of domestic violence, grieving parents, police officers and social workers.
Why do some acts of violence become everyone’s fear, while others remain someone else’s tragedy?
For over three decades, my work has taken me into places that rarely make the headlines. I have sat with mothers who lost daughters to dowry. I have listened to women whose bruises remained hidden behind the walls of respectable homes. I have spoken with children who had learnt, much too early, that silence was often rewarded more than truth. Violence was present in all these places. Yet much of it never became a national conversation.
And that contrast has always troubled me.
As I reflected on the recent train incident, I discussed it with TD, a clinical psychologist. Our conversation quickly moved away from crime and entered the terrain of the human mind.
TD said something deceptively simple.
“The mind does not count statistics. It remembers stories.”
That single sentence changed the way I looked at the incident.
Psychologists describe this process as socialised fear. An isolated act of violence, when repeatedly witnessed through television, mobile phones and conversations, begins to feel personally relevant to millions of people. We no longer watch it as observers. We begin to experience it as participants. Somewhere inside our minds, we quietly ask ourselves: 1
“What if that had been me?”
Our brains evolved to learn through stories long before they learned to interpret statistics. For thousands of years, stories protected human beings. If someone in the community encountered danger, everyone else learned from that experience. Today, technology has amplified this ancient survival mechanism. A single video can be replayed millions of times. Each replay becomes another emotional rehearsal. The violence happens once, but psychologically it is experienced over and over again. 2
Fear, therefore, spreads not only because violence exists, but because imagination is extraordinarily powerful.
This does not mean our fear is irrational.
Far from it.
Fear is one of humanity’s oldest survival instincts. Without it, our ancestors would not have survived predators, wars or disasters. The problem begins when fear quietly changes from being a protective companion into a permanent resident. When every crowded train begins to look dangerous. When every stranger appears threatening. When ordinary life starts shrinking because of extraordinary events. 3
This distinction is important.
Because fear itself is not the enemy.
The question is: what does fear persuade us to become?
As I reflected on this, another memory surfaced.
Years ago, while working with women who had survived domestic violence, one of them said something that has never left me.
“The beating stopped,” she told me quietly, “but the fear never did.”
At that time, I understood her words as a description of trauma.
Today, I realise they also describe society.
Violence often ends before fear does.
The incident on the train lasted minutes.
Its psychological life continues long after.
This is why conversations about violence cannot stop at policing, punishment or law alone. Those are indispensable, but they address only one part of the story. Violence also reshapes how people perceive safety, trust strangers, travel to work, raise children and imagine their own futures.
The visible injury belongs to the victim.
The invisible injury belongs to society.
Understanding that invisible injury is perhaps one of the most urgent conversations of our time.
Because if violence changes how millions think, feel and behave, then our response cannot be limited to catching perpetrators alone. We must also learn how to protect our collective psychological well-being.
That journey begins by understanding fear—not dismissing it.
And perhaps by asking a question we rarely ask after the headlines fade.
A QUESTION THAT STAYED WITH ME…
If one act of violence can make millions afraid to board a train, what determines which acts of violence enter our collective imagination—and which ones quietly disappear behind closed doors?
That is the question I carry into the next conversation.
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.
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