Picture a courtroom in Bangladesh. A woman is sitting on a bench, hiding her bruises, and waiting to testify against her own husband who beats her mercilessly.
When her name is called, she suddenly changes her original story, fervently trying to withdraw the case and convince the magistrate that her injuries were rather the result of an accident.
Outside the courtroom, her mother-in-law is standing, waiting for her to take her to the same house, the same husband, and the same violence.
This is not a rare scenario in Bangladesh’s family courts or police stations; rather, it is a pattern so common here that oftentimes the police or the court shows reluctance to even register cases of domestic violence.
Why do these women, despite years of abuse, try to protect their abusers?
To answer this question, let us travel 53 years into the past.
In 1973, four employees (three women and one man) of Kreditbanken Bank in Stockholm were taken hostage by two robbers for six days.
By the time the police were able to free them, they had grown protective of their captors, refusing to testify against the perpetrators and instead raising money for their legal defense.
Psychiatrists called this condition Stockholm Syndrome; a survival response where the victim develops sympathy, even loyalty toward the abuser who controls their fear.
Similarly, among women who are victims of abuse, a long period of intimate violence and torture produces Stockholm Syndrome in the form of fierce trauma bonding, which leads to an unintentional instinct to protect their abuser from consequences of their own.
In Bangladesh’s household scenario, this trauma bond rarely announces itself as a pathology; rather, it looks like a housewife telling her neighbours that the bruises on her face are from an accidental fall down the stairs, a mother telling her daughter to call the injuries on her body marks of a self-inflicted accident, or a young wife defending her husband’s violence as occasional outbursts of anger.
According to analysts, the main reasons for South Asian women experiencing Stockholm Syndrome are financial dependency, fear of social stigma, patriarchal society, and a conviction that suffering silently is a form of loyalty and a badge of honour for women. A woman's own family often supports this idea of protecting the abusive husband at any cost.
This is akin to the boiling-frog pattern, where researchers illustrate that when abuse towards a woman increases gradually, she can lose the ability or the willingness to protect herself or remove herself from the situation.
Based on the irrational belief that the world cannot offer her a better alternative than what she already has, she thus ends up subconsciously developing instincts to protect her abusive partner.
To make things worse, the Domestic Violence Act (2010) in Bangladesh every so often clashes head-on with the involuntary, deep state of self-preservation in women who have been conditioned to defend their abusers.
As a result, police, often reluctantly, send complaints back for domestic violence matters to be settled “domestically.”
Millions of women enable their partners to continue abusing them throughout their relationships. However, putting the onus of standing up to violence on the victims themselves is easy but, by no means, fair.
Instead, we need to ask the difficult questions here.
Why, after all, do the abused women enable their abusers? And why do they keep protecting these sadist oppressors?
A quick glance at these ill-fated women’s formative years will tell you why.
Since their early days, many women see their mothers silently suffer physical and mental torture, verbal assault, and various other forms of hostility in their own house.
These women keep hearing from their family, neighbours, relatives, and everyone else in society that domestic disputes are normal between married couples, that “purush manush ektu emoni hoy, meye der manay nite hoy” (men will be men and women need to adjust), that a woman’s real house is her husband’s house, and that a good wife should prioritize her family honour and endure her husband’s maltreatment at any cost.
The mass media these women become exposed to during the developmental period further normalizes and even glamorizes violence against women.
Many movies, dramas, and even cartoons typically characterize women as damsels in distress and men as their saviors, romanticizing toxic relationships and portraying physical violence as a sign of passionate love.
Essentially, when a woman is repetitively told that she is a nobody without her husband, the narrative gets fixated in her mind.
Sometimes this narrative can become so noxious that women even end up becoming complicit in their husbands’ crimes. In the brutal Ramisa rape and murder case, for instance, the wife of the offender actively took part in the atrocity.
While this woman’s crimes are unforgivable, have we ever stopped to think that perhaps it was Stockholm Syndrome that made her feel compelled to protect her husband?
What can be done to save these women from themselves? Do we really believe that only enforcing stricter laws against domestic violence, getting more women educated, or helping women become financially independent will solve the issue?
Admittedly, a combined effort from all these fronts will likely improve the situation to a certain extent. However, until and unless our society recalibrates its views on domestic violence and stops telling women to adjust, accept, and adapt, women will continue to protect the very hand that hurts them.
Nadia Afroze Disha is a lecturer at BRAC Business School and Faizah Zahin is an English and Humanities student, BRAC University.