Building a praxis bridge: Remapping domestic violence in India using an expanded conceptual framework aligned with complex trauma

Domestic Violence affects 1 in 3 women worldwide. Empirical evidence from India suggests that women and girls experience a continuum of violence and discrimination from prenatal stages till death in families that largely continue to operate within a dominantly patriarchal framework. However, quantitative literature on domestic violence in India suffers from problems pertaining to reductive and episodic framing, focusing on short-term prevalence, and frames the impact on survivors largely in terms of clinical constructs such as anxiety, depression, and PTSD. This work argues for a broader, thematic framing of domestic and familial violence and contends that the psychological sequelae of this kind of chronic and systemic discrimination and violence cannot be captured using rigid clinical constructs that dominate psychological literature. We propose a conceptual framework utilizing case studies that is loosely and partially aligned with the tenets of complex trauma. However, we also critique its origin within hegemonic psychiatry that led to yet another diagnostic construct and highlight the need for creating a culturally adapted expansion—to shift the emphasis from an individually rooted, diagnostic framework to a continuous trauma framework that allows researchers to dissect the psychological alterations in survivors of domestic violence in a non-clinical and contextual manner.