Abusive Relationships
Domestic Violence has been investigated and written about extensively during the last few decades. There are many laws to protect women from cruelty. Social organizations have sprung up, where a woman can take temporary shelter until her future plans are sorted out. But a woman who is subjected to emotional abuse suffers alone because her scars are invisible.
No broken bones or bruises to show. There are no parameters against which the extent of her trauma can be quantified. It is usually a private interaction between a husband and wife. At best, the family who knows collude to make it their best-kept secret.
Who Is Being Abused?
Emotional Abuse is more a malady of the middle and upper classes. Illiterates have no use for such subtleties. For them, wife battering is good enough, though this pastime is not necessarily confined to the ghettos. Even men like Noel Coward believed that “some women should be struck regularly like gongs.” Others were even more emphatic that “a spaniel, a woman, a walnut tree – the more they are beaten, the better they be.” Physical and emotional abuses are not mutually exclusive. What begins as verbal abuse may end in physical violence.
