GyaniNani's Reading Room

Tag: violence

  • Beyond the Breaking News-Part-2

    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.

  • Beyond the Breaking News-Part 1

    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.