IT is not news anymore that women live in a moment where male anger and violence is a constant threat. Everywhere in the world, women are being subjected to violence against their bodies, their minds, their families, and their livelihoods. According to the United Nations, which is currently commemorating 16 days of activism against gender violence, a woman or girl is intentionally killed every 10 minutes by a partner or family member. It is not surprising then that 60 per cent of femicides are committed by partners and relatives.

Further research shows that intimate partner violence causes enduring consequences, such as acute and chronic conditions, physical disabilities, persistent health complications, psychological conditions, and even mortality. It was reported some years ago, that this sort of violence leads to approximately two million injuries and 1,200 deaths in the US alone.

Death and beatings are the most egregious forms of violence but some emphasis must also be put on all other forms of violence that are daily and hourly lobbed at women from all sides. In Pakistan, death or physical violence is often held up as ‘real’ violence against women while other forms of violence are somehow considered permissible or are disregarded. Because physical violence is itself rampant in the country, women who face lesser forms of it are told to consider themselves lucky. Women who face verbal, financial and psychological abuse are told that they are not abused at all.

The truth is that many non-physical forms of violence can cause just as much and just as enduring harm as physical forms of violence. Often, these forms of violence can be even more insidious because they are not very visible to others and can therefore continue unchecked for very long periods of time. Emotional and psychological abuse refers to the emotional distress caused to an individual through verbal aggression, threatening behaviour, intimidation, or coercive tactics that abusers use to exert control, instil fear, and undermine the self-worth of their victims.

Women who face verbal, financial and psychological abuse are told that they are not abused at all.

Unfortunately, there is no standard definition of psychological abuse but it can be understood as intended to belittle and humiliate the victim and to take away their dignity so that they do not protest against continuing abuse. Arguably, in almost all cases, this form of abuse is a precursor to other forms of domestic violence.

One example of this sort of abuse manifests itself in damaging objects belonging to the victim or infusing toxicity into the environment around the victim as a way of frightening and mentally torturing her.

Take, for instance, an angry husband who proceeds to throw out all of his wife’s clothes from an apartment balcony onto the street below. While this is not causing any immediate physical harm to the woman, it is a way of belittling and harming her psychologically and in front of the neighbourhood.

Another case may be one of isolation where the abuser gets so angry every time the victim leaves home to visit her own relatives that she stops making such visits altogether. This isolates the victim so that the abuser can control her sense of reality, thus increasing the extent of control he exercises over her.

Coercive control, then, is a way of controlling the environment, resources and sense of physical, psychological and emotional security of a victim in a way that she can be manipulated into doing just what the abuser wants. Some emotional and psychological abuse is obvious such as name-calling, hurling abuses, isolating the victim, jealousy, monitoring locations, stalking, controlling the victim’s appearance, public humiliation, accusations of unfaithfulness, blaming the victim for the abuser’s actions, gaslighting, or damaging belongings. All these create an environment of coercive control where otherwise benign actions are weaponised to create a web that traps the victim in the abuser’s realm of control.

Although everyone knows that physical beatings are abuse and that abusers have become adept at hiding evidence of them, there needs to be more discussion of these other forms of abuse in Pakistani society. While women are the primary focus of marital or intimate partner abuse, all women in a household are vulnerable and face violence at home. These include older women particularly if they are infirm, disabled or are ill. And as the gruesome case of 10-year-old Sara Sharif, murdered by her Pakistani father in the UK reveals, young female children are just as vulnerable to abuse at home.

Even if women — daughters, wives, mothers, and sisters — do not end up dead they bear the scars of the abuse that haunts their lives. Pakistani women are tough — they have to be in such a patriarchal society — but increasingly, their emotional lives are buried under the weight of scar tissue left by near-constant onslaught of abuse at the hands of the men in their lives.

This means that they are unable to freely enjoy the simple joys that make life worth living — for instance, being able to celebrate their own and their children’s successes, without worrying about repercussions, or being able to call a friend and visit a parent without having to worry about the explanations that would have to be handed to a jealous and abusive spouse and in-laws.

Life in Pakistan is already full of stresses, but the addition of social sanction and approval for this sort of treatment of women and a gross ignorance of all these forms of coercive control that are flourishing unchecked is a ghastly reality. The women who die are killed in one fell swoop and robbed of all the potential within life; the women who are left alive die a slower, grittier death by a thousand cuts, their spirit gone before their body perishes.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, November 27th, 2024