Violence Against Women Is Not Conflict Gone Wrong. A Psychologist Explains What It Really Is.
- Sarah El Nabulsi, M.Sc., M.A., M.A.
- Jul 7
- 8 min read
MBC1 — SABAH AL KHAIR YA ARAB ·
Ms. Sarah El Nabulsi, M.Sc., M.A., M.A., DHA Licensed Clinical Psychologist, joined MBC1's Sabah Al Khair Ya Arab to address a topic that remains significantly underreported, culturally minimised, and psychologically misunderstood — particularly in Arab communities: violence against women.
It Is Not Conflict. It Is Control.
There is a common explanation for domestic violence that I hear repeatedly — in culture, in media, and sometimes even in the clinical context. The explanation goes like this: he lost his temper. Things escalated. The relationship has a lot of tension, and sometimes it gets out of hand.
This framing is wrong. And its wrongness matters, because it leads everyone — the woman, her family, the community around her — to look for solutions in entirely the wrong place.
Violence against women within the home is not conflict that got out of control. It is a sustained exercise of control. According to the World Health Organization's 2021 global estimates, approximately one in three women worldwide has experienced physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence in her lifetime — making this one of the most prevalent human rights violations on the planet. The WHO is explicit in its framing: this is not relationship dysfunction. It is an exercise of power.
The person who commits this abuse is not someone who cannot regulate their emotions — they are someone who wants total dominance over another person's life, choices, body, and reality. What I have observed clinically, and what research consistently confirms, is that individuals who engage in this behaviour do not see their partner as a separate human being with her own inner world, her own needs, her own rights. They see her as an extension of themselves. As something that belongs to them. And when something you believe you own does not comply with your demands, you do not negotiate — you force compliance.
Understanding this is not just semantically important. It changes everything about how we respond.
Violence Is Not Only Physical
One of the most important things I said in this interview — and one of the most important things any awareness conversation about this topic can communicate — is that violence against women is not exclusively physical.
Physical abuse is the most visible form, and the one most likely to be taken seriously. But it is far from the only form. Researchers and international bodies including the UN have documented six distinct categories of intimate partner abuse:
Verbal abuse — the use of language to demean, humiliate, threaten, and erode a woman's sense of herself. Words that, over time, do measurable psychological damage.
Psychological and emotional abuse — manipulation, gaslighting, isolation from family and friends, the systematic dismantling of a woman's confidence in her own perceptions and judgements. Judith Herman, in her landmark work Trauma and Recovery, describes this as a process of "chronic trauma" that can be as damaging as acute physical violence.
Sexual abuse — within marriage as well as outside of it. This remains one of the most underreported categories, particularly in Arab communities where cultural norms make it extraordinarily difficult for women to name or discuss.
Reproductive abuse — controlling a woman's reproductive choices, including decisions about contraception, pregnancy, and when or whether to have children.
Financial abuse — denying a woman access to money, preventing her from working, keeping her financially dependent as a mechanism of control. UN Women identifies financial abuse as one of the primary barriers preventing women from leaving abusive relationships.
All of these forms of abuse cause genuine, lasting psychological harm. The absence of visible physical injury does not mean the absence of violence, and it does not mean the absence of serious damage.
What Abuse Does to a Woman Psychologically
When a woman lives with sustained abuse — of any form — in her own home, inflicted by the person closest to her, the psychological consequences are profound and multilayered.
The first thing that happens is the development of a state of chronic inner panic. She may not always be consciously aware of it — in fact, as a coping strategy, many women learn to push it out of conscious awareness — but her nervous system is in a constant state of alert. As psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk documents extensively in The Body Keeps the Score, trauma keeps the brain's threat-detection system in a state of chronic activation. It cannot shut down. It cannot recuperate. It is always scanning for the next threat, always braced.
Over time, this chronic hypervigilance has physical consequences: elevated cortisol, migraines, exhaustion, a body that is perpetually depleted. The nervous system was not designed to remain in a state of emergency indefinitely. When it is forced to, health collapses.
But the most significant psychological consequence — and the one I want to be clear about — is the gradual erosion of a woman's sense of self. Her sense of her own reality. Her sense of her own worth. Her sense of herself as an individual with the right to exist on her own terms.
This erosion is not accidental. It is the mechanism through which control is maintained.
Why Women Stay: The Reality of Trauma Bonding
When people encounter a situation where a woman is being abused, the most instinctive question is: why doesn't she just leave?
The question, while understandable, fundamentally misunderstands what is happening psychologically.
I want to introduce a clinical concept that is crucial to understanding this: trauma bonding. The term was first defined by psychologist Patrick Carnes in his 1997 work The Betrayal Bond, and describes a form of psychological attachment that forms between an abuser and their victim — one of the most powerful and paradoxical attachment dynamics in human psychology.
The trauma bond creates an attachment to the abuser that is, paradoxically, stronger than the attachment the woman feels toward anyone else in her life. She cannot be without him. The relationship feels essential to her survival in a way she cannot fully explain and often cannot fully understand herself.
This is not weakness. This is not stupidity. This is a well-documented psychological response to a specific set of conditions: intermittent reinforcement, isolation, the systematic destruction of self-worth, and the kind of cyclical abuse that alternates between terror and apparent closeness. Researchers have identified this same dynamic in hostage situations — it was first described clinically following studies of what became known as Stockholm Syndrome — and it operates with equal or greater force in intimate partnerships, where love, shared history, children, and financial dependence are all in play.
We should also never forget that in many cases, financial dependency is a very real reason women cannot simply leave. UN Women estimates that financial abuse and economic dependence are factors in the majority of cases where women remain in abusive relationships. They do not have the resources to protect themselves and their children. They have been kept from building those resources deliberately.
How to Begin to Rebuild
What I tell women I have worked with in these situations is this: awareness is the first step. Understanding the mechanism — understanding what this person is actually doing and what it is doing to you — is itself a form of resistance. When you see the dynamic clearly, you begin to interrupt its grip.
If the abuse involves physical violence that places a woman's life in danger, there is no room for gradual steps. She must leave the home immediately and contact authorities and family. Her physical safety is the absolute priority — nothing else can be addressed before that.
In situations that are not immediately life-threatening, the path forward often involves building financial independence — sometimes quietly, sometimes incrementally — so that she gradually has the resources to protect herself and her children and to leave when it is safe to do so.
And she should never have to do this alone. Support from family, from trusted friends, and from professional psychological help is not a luxury. It is part of how recovery becomes possible.
In the UAE, the Dubai Foundation for Women and Children (DFWAC) provides support and shelter for women and children affected by domestic violence. If you or someone you know is in this situation, please reach out.
The Blame Must Never Land on the Victim
I want to address this directly: a woman who is being abused is not responsible for the abuse she is receiving.
The impulse to say "she should have stood up for herself earlier" or "she should have set limits" is a form of victim-blaming that compounds the harm. It adds shame to injury. It locates the problem in the person with the least power in the situation rather than in the person who chose to abuse.
According to the WHO, intimate partner violence affects women at far higher rates than men globally, and is among the most severely underreported crimes in the world — precisely because of the fear of being blamed, disbelieved, or told to manage the situation differently. Research published in The Lancet has consistently found that social stigma and victim-blaming are among the primary barriers to women seeking help after abuse.
Our response must be the opposite. We listen. We believe. We help.
What Happens to the Children
Violence against women in the home does not only affect the woman. The children who grow up in that environment carry the impact of what they have witnessed — and research is unambiguous about what that impact looks like.
According to WHO research on intergenerational violence, boys who grow up in homes where their father abuses their mother are significantly more likely to become perpetrators of intimate partner violence in their own adult relationships. Not because they are inherently bad — but because what children observe becomes their model for how relationships work, for what love looks like, for what power is.
The landmark ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) studies, published by Felitti and colleagues in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, established a clear dose-response relationship between childhood exposure to violence in the home and a range of later-life outcomes in girls and women: elevated rates of eating disorders, risky sexual behaviours, substance use, and addiction. These are not coincidences. They are the downstream consequences of a childhood spent in a home where safety, stability, and dignity were absent.
The damage to children is one of the strongest arguments — alongside every other — for why tolerating, minimising, or looking away from violence against women has consequences that reach across generations.
What We Can All Do
The single most important cultural shift we need — and this applies in the Arab world as much as anywhere — is to raise our collective sensitivity to all forms of abuse. Not just the physical. All of it.
When we see a partner speak harshly to his wife in public, we look away. We tell ourselves it is not our business. We minimise it. But in communities where there is a high level of public awareness and sensitivity around this behaviour, people notice. They name it. They do not allow it to pass unremarked.
That cultural alertness is not an intrusion. It is a form of collective protection.
We must raise awareness and sensitivity. We must create genuine resources for women experiencing abuse. We must stop blaming victims. And the men who engage in this behaviour must seek help — not because I am judging them, but because this kind of harm requires professional intervention, and they owe that effort to the people they have hurt.
About Ms. Sarah El Nabulsi
Ms. Sarah El Nabulsi, M.Sc., M.A., M.A. is a DHA Licensed Clinical Psychologist (License No. DHA-75083705) based in Dubai, and UAE Director of the Transcendental Meditation Organization. She has been featured on MBC, MBC1, Sky News Arabia, Dubai TV, and BBC Arabic, and is the founder of the online courses Anxiety 101 (Level 1) and Master Yourself (Level 2).
Related reading: Transcending Trauma: How to Heal After Catastrophic Loss
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