It’s not only love-spurned people like Sekhar who are capable of feeling overpowering rage. It’s important to remember that you and I are capable of it too.
In analyzing the case of Divya and Sekhar and others like it, we need to look at two elements. One is the sense of entitlement that today’s youngsters are growing up with, never having been denied anything.
The other is the element of power that characterizes these relationships. An entire generation has grown up always getting a desired object and without learning that there can be limits. This sets them up for an incapability to handle rejection.
From that position, rage is very likely to be triggered and lead to an incident like we have seen this week.
I have seen that in most such cases of girls being murdered by suspicious boyfriends or by stalkers, parents often come to know of her relationship or harassment after the girl loses her life. Also, such an act of extreme violence as we have seen in the Divya-Sekhar case would very likely have been preceded by violent behavior in the past as well. In no case could it have been the first instance of violence as these relationships are essentially based on power and control.
Also parents and society at large induce tolerance of abusive relationships in women.
They push women to be submissive and men to be dominating. While childhood is the defining period when a child’s psychology is formed, their relationships are typically a copy of their relationships with their parents. Having been a victim of violence or having witnessed indifference to violence within the family or outside desensitizes a youngster to violence.
Along with such induced behavior patterns, exposure to Hollywood movies feeds a dispassionate attitude to violence in youth today. Indian cinema on the other hand gives romance a rather obsessive nature.
For instance, actors and actresses are shown forgetting even to eat when in love.
Regional cinema in fact portrays man-woman relationships in terms of power, resulting in a desensitization towards women.
Reel life is meant to be a break from real life, but it is actually breaking into real life.
Acid throwing, rape or even killing with a baseball bat for that matter, is an example of a power equation where the guy wants to show the victim that even if he cannot get her, he has control over her life and can change it forever. Unexplained anger, coercion or threats, abusive behavior, isolation and intimidation, trying to establish control, using male privilege, economic abuse or even denying abuse later on and blaming are signs to be careful about. While all of this happens under the parents’ nose, it is the parents who need to be accepting of their children, showing them support and getting them to talk about their relationships and about what’s going on in their minds.
The relationship with parents and between one’s parents defines the nature of relationships of the child with his/her partner and in general as well. However, this does not always mean that a person will only replicate the abusive relationship. He or she may also take a complete aversion to it and consciously decide to have relationships based on equality. However, people who are into power equations generally want it in all relationships but it is mostly likely to work out only in case of partners as colleagues, parents, friends and siblings would not put up with it.
Diana Monteiro is director of the Hyderabad Academy of Psychology