When Silence Becomes Survival the Psychology of Silence, The Politics of Voice, and the Imperative of Trauma-Responsive Practice for Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence in India

Abstract

In India, silence is the most common response to ntimate partner violence (IPV): the National Family Health Survey-5 records that approximately 29% of ever-married women aged eighteen to forty-nine have experienced spousal violence, and that roughly 86% of them have never sought help from any source. This article argues that such silence is neither indifference nor mere passivity but a rational, structurally enforced, and psychologically deep phenomenon operating simultaneously at three distinct but interdependent levels. At the neurological level, sustained interpersonal trauma reorganises the brain and the body in ways that make coherent, consistent articulation difficult precisely where institutions most demand it. At the psychological level, coercive control, intermittent reinforcement, and intimate betrayal displace the survivor’s own voice with a dominant, problem-saturated narrative authored by the abuser and corroborated by a patriarchal social order. At the structural level, family, community, law enforcement, and the adversarial legal process have historically enforced rather than invited disclosure. Against this layered silence, the article examines Narrative Therapy, trauma-specific Cognitive Behavioural Therapy — principally Cognitive Processing Therapy and Prolonged Exposure — and Trauma-Informed Care as complementary frameworks for restoring voice, and draws on restorative justice scholarship to argue that recovery from IPV ultimately requires the social recognition of harm. Insisting throughout on contextual translation to the intersecting realities of caste, class, religion, gender, and economic dependence, the article contends that breaking silence demands coordinated, sequential intervention at every level at which it is produced.