Intimate terrorism

As the world allover we romanticize spending more time with our families, getting to truly know and understand each other, bonding through activities, etc., a massive section of society who do not have the luxury to count their homes as safe spaces are being placed under duress by the necessary and continuing lockdown. Globally, all helpline numbers, child protective services, women protective services, and all legal and social help centers have had the biggest surge in calls and cases in the recent past. 

Domestic abuse and child abuse are at an all-time high, defiantly eviscerating our collective tendency to idealize the concepts of family and home. 

In an almost dystopian situation where mankind is attempting to fight an unseen enemy by being made to stay indoors and away from fellow beings, there is a litany of frustrations that are crippling our psyche and our ability to function 'correctly' or 'normally'. 

There is a massive amount of burden on homemakers and working mothers to be high-functioning, because everybody at home constantly means constant attention, and duties to fulfill. Since domestic help is a risky route to take, traditional gender roles are putting a lot of stress on women to over-perform, while they themselves are undergoing the frustrations of a lockdown.

Redressal methods are hard to carry out since at this point the victim is pretty much stuck with their abuser 24/7 and fear extreme repercussions to reporting an already extreme situation. Stereotypical ideologies resurfacing along with bruised egos owing to the current work environment have resulted in a lot of men taking out their frustrations on their children and the women of the household. 

In a community where women are workhorses, sources of pleasure, and an outlet of all anguish rolled into one, these helpless women are stuck inside the four walls that were already the source of their nightmare, or have become so, right now. They are weighed down by the centuries-old expectation to be the one that placates that nurses that heals, and society's indoctrination that they are second in position to their husbands, and a lot of the times sheer physical inability to strike back. 

Before we began featuring in the latest version of apocalypse now, most cries for social and moral equality were direly overlooked or shutdown as overreactions because we as a community have become good at paying lip service to be liberal. I have always personally believed that our milieu plays a big role in defining who we are, as a person. When forcefully shut inside four walls, when everything is a big question mark, when I don't know what will happen to my savings, if I'll be employed when this is done, I need to understand that raising my hand against another person, or raising my voice against them because I have been granted the authority to do so, is not an option. It is not something I should merely refrain from doing, it is something I shouldn't factor in as even a dimly possible option. 

'Intimate terrorism' is a term I came across post lockdown, and the accounts of women and children and men are truly horrifying. With the concerned law and order having to deal with a worldwide pandemic, humanity is taking menacing steps backward in the progress we made at rote-learning that every human being deserves dignity of existence. 

While we joke about parents who pulled fire alarms in their buildings simply to get a glimpse of someone who is not their perceivably exhausting toddler, we must also be aware of the fact that a lot of others are taking that frustration out on the helpless. 

I peruse lockdown memes because it is some version of 'misery loves company', but I do that in the confines of the four walls that will always be my safe haven. I wish these reports of domestic and child abuse cases wouldn't be a part of our arguments whenever we next argue policy, but they will be, because in so many households, in strata of society, in communities, in mentalities, physical and mental abuse is still a part of life.