Psychological Effects on Indian Married Women Due to Intimate Partner Violence

Abstract

Intimate partner violence (IPV) has immense psychological trauma that goes way beyond physical harm but its implications on identity, self-image, and emotional ability are not well studied in the Indian setting. In its current mixed-method sequential research, the study explored the psychological impact of IPV on 47 Indian married women with the combination of quantitative psychometric analysis and qualitative research. In the Phase 1 women in the High-IPV group had a significantly higher perceived stress and the severity of the IPV trauma was a powerful independent predictor of psychological distress. Contrary to theoretical expectation, perceived social support did not buffer the IPV stress relationshipinstead, the association between IPV and perceived stress became stronger at higher levels of social support, thereby contradicting the buffering hypothesis. Phase 2 qualitative interviews of 12 participants found eight themes of a consistent arc of erased self, starting with a pre-abuse identity of confident expression, through a series of suppression, hypervigilance, emotional numbing and relation isolation, to a fundamentally discontinuous present-day self. The insignificant social support result was attributed to two processes: the functional inaccessibility of social networks due to isolation and relocation, and family reactions that resulted in the imposition of marital endurance instead of providing real protection. Collectively, the results indicate that IPV is not a series of episodes of violence, but a long-lasting coercive control system that both increases the level of psychological distress and destroys the social resources. The article proposes culturally grounded, trauma-informed clinical and policy responses to address the invisibility, identity-level effects of IPV in India.