The invisible scars of war: how to break the cycle of violence and reclaim your voice

01.07.2026 Blog

When evil becomes ordinary

Why are societies able to justify violence even when its scale becomes catastrophic? Why do people who have been harmed so often stay silent and doubt their own experience? How do fear, shame and the need for safety make people stay close to those who hurt them? And what happens to humanity — individual and collective — when violence no longer seems unacceptable?

War leaves behind more than loss and destruction — it changes how we perceive pain. In a society that lives every day amid news of death and devastation, an unspoken hierarchy of suffering takes shape: some experiences become more visible and recognised, while others are pushed into the background.

Compassion is not a stable state. Constant exposure to other people’s pain does not always deepen empathy; sometimes it does the opposite — it dulls sensitivity and turns suffering into background noise. The more people are harmed, the easier it becomes for a society to lose its sensitivity to their pain.

An exhausted psyche copes less well with ambiguity. When a person lives in fear, tension or overload for a long time, the need grows for simple explanations, an external enemy and the restoration of a sense of control at any cost. It is in this state that dehumanisation begins to look not horrifying but “logical”, and complex reality too exhausting to bear.

But war rarely creates violence from scratch. Far more often it exposes and radicalises the forms of inequality and oppression that already existed in society. All forms of violence — from interpersonal to mass violence — share a common logic:

a struggle for power;
control over another person’s autonomy;
the right to decide whose life, pain and safety count as important enough.

This is exactly where we must return again and again to our inner compass: what exactly am I doing right now — and with what intention? Am I trying to see the source of pain, or to find a target at which to direct hatred? Am I protecting life, dignity and freedom — or trying to destroy what reminds me of my own vulnerability?

In the name of what “destruction of values” are LGBTQI+ people killed? How strong are values if they collapse from the very fact that otherness exists? Why is violence committed against women and girls — if not out of a desire to subjugate, humiliate and demonstrate power over another person’s body and autonomy? And is it not by the same logic that Russia comes to “liberate” other peoples — from their language, memory, identity and right to be themselves?

Drawing these parallels matters not in order to equate all forms of violence with one another, but in order to adjust our own lens: to see where exactly dehumanisation begins, and whose side we end up on when we justify it or stay silent about it. Russia is not fighting for its own identity — for centuries it has been trying to destroy the identities of others.

Human rights are not something “for later” during a war. On the contrary — they are what determines whether a society is fighting for life, dignity and freedom, or is following the path of identifying with the aggressor.

How violence gets the right to exist

Violence does not exist apart from the system of inequality on which it rests. It rarely begins with open cruelty. Far more often it is born in an environment where control, humiliation or inequality gradually come to be seen as acceptable. In this sense, violence exists not only as a separate act — it becomes embedded in general social norms, in ideas about power and in the ways people respond to others’ pain.

As a result, not all lives are equally recognised as lives whose loss deserves to be mourned. Some people receive fewer rights to visibility, safety, protection and compassion — especially when their identity, body, way of life or the very fact of their existence falls outside dominant social norms.

Emotions do not exist outside politics and social relations. Fear, hatred or disgust “attach” themselves to certain bodies and groups of people, determining who is perceived as “one of us” and who as a threat or as something of lesser worth.

That is exactly why we speak of gender-based violence (GBV): it disproportionately affects women and girls, as well as LGBTQI+ people, people with disabilities, internally displaced people, children, older people and everyone whose autonomy is already limited by unequal power relations, gender stereotypes and existing social norms.

In wartime the number of GBV cases only grows, because it is directly linked to deepening inequality and dependence. Mass displacement, economic instability and overloaded social protection systems limit access to resources and support, forcing more and more people to rely on whoever happens to be nearby.

Violence is born where one person stops recognising the agency of another. The aim of violence is not only to cause physical harm. It becomes a tool of control, humiliation and the demonstration of power, and a way of destroying the sense of safety, dignity and agency of entire communities and peoples.

Patriarchal culture teaches people to renounce vulnerability, emotionality and the capacity for empathy.

The French philosopher Simone Weil wrote that force is capable of turning a human being into a “thing”. This is exactly what happens in a situation of violence: the other person stops being perceived as a living being with their own pain, boundaries and dignity.

That is why colonial regimes, totalitarian systems, misogyny and queerphobia are so often accompanied by the denial of people’s very right to exist and to have their own voice. Treating others as objects — regardless of the scale of the pain inflicted on them — becomes a defining feature of a social field in which a person is perceived as a function, a resource or a tool.

Violence destroys not only the person it targets, but also the very ability to see a living human being in another.

Destructiveness can be an attempt to cope with inner powerlessness through power over others. Such adjustment can become an adaptation to an environment in which lowering one’s sensitivity to other people’s pain starts to look like a necessary condition for survival. But should someone else’s inability to cope with their own vulnerability make violence the norm and place responsibility for it on those who live through it?

Violence lives not only by force — it strives to remain hidden and unpunished. When people who have been harmed begin to speak in their own voice, to call what they went through violence and to refuse to be ashamed of their own pain, this threatens the logic of such a system. Those who break the silence will be discredited, intimidated and pressured into falling silent again.

To acknowledge the reality of someone else’s pain means, at the same time, to acknowledge one’s own vulnerability, possible helplessness or even complicity in the system that sustains this violence. Shifting responsibility onto survivors makes it possible to preserve the illusion of a just and controllable world: it is hard for people to accept that violence can be random and unjust, and therefore might one day touch them too.

The Ukrainian feminist philosopher Tamara Zlobina offers a telling analogy: if we imagine Russia’s war against Ukraine as an act of violence, then rhetoric that tries to explain or justify the aggression through Ukraine’s own actions reproduces the same logic as victim-blaming in cases of sexualised or domestic violence.

Systemic phenomena are also made up of countless personal choices. Violence is reproduced every time it is justified, devalued, ignored or when responsibility is shifted onto those who were harmed.

Viktor Frankl wrote that everything can be taken from a person except the ability to choose one’s own attitude and way of responding. It is in this space of choice that the possibility arises not to reproduce violence any further.

The ability to feel compassion for others is inseparable from the ability to bear one’s own vulnerability. Losing contact with one’s own humanity almost inevitably leads to losing sensitivity to the humanity of others. Perhaps that is why one of the most important forms of mental hygiene in times of mass violence is a constant return to one’s own humanity — the ability to search for meaning and to notice the line beyond which protecting oneself from pain begins to make part of us emotionally lifeless.

Why violence remains invisible

The American psychiatrist Judith Herman wrote: “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word “unspeakable”.”

This applies to both gender-based violence and the mass violence of war: at the individual and the collective level, the psyche seeks to protect itself from horror through repression, denial or distancing from those who remind it of that horror. But even when a society already knows that violence exists, this does not mean it is able to bear it, acknowledge it or see it. The trauma of violence exists between two forces — the need to tell the truth and the urge to make it invisible.

Social reactions — whether a person will be believed, whether they will be blamed for what they went through, whether their experience will be met with respect and support — play a decisive role in reproducing this silent consent. Fear of judgement, disbelief and retraumatisation are among the main reasons why survivors do not seek help or put it off for years. People fear not only the violence itself, but also that after reaching out they will have to prove the reality of their own pain again and again.

This is how a closed circle forms: violence goes unnoticed because it has been normalised, and survivors stay silent because they expect to be devalued, disbelieved or retraumatised.

The limits of what is acceptable are not destroyed overnight — they are tested gradually through hate speech, stereotypes, humiliating jokes, the normalisation of control or the denial of other people’s right to define their own experience. That is why societies are able to get used even to things it would seem impossible to stay silent about.

Dehumanisation becomes embedded in everyday life gradually:

First, certain groups of people start to be perceived as “funny”, “wrong” or “dangerous”.
Then as people whose pain does not require compassion.
At the final stage, violence against them no longer causes moral shock.

Language in this sense is never neutral: it determines whom society is ready to see as a full human being and whom as a problem, a threat or a statistical error.

In interpersonal relationships, boundaries also shift through control, jealousy, humiliation or devaluation, which at first may hide behind “care”, “emotionality”, a “difficult character” or a “hard time”. That is why people often do not immediately realise what situation they are in: the psyche gradually adapts to what only recently seemed unacceptable.

And when violence turns out to be bound up with closeness, attachment and the need for safety, the situation becomes especially hard to leave. In our psychological and legal practice we regularly encounter the stories of people who for a long time did not call what they went through violence and did not dare to ask for help.

Violence does not always come in the form of an obvious threat from outside. In most cases the perpetrators turn out to be not “dangerous strangers” but people from one’s close circle — partners, relatives, friends, acquaintances — people one trusts or depends on.

According to international statistics for 2024, around 50,000 women and girls worldwide were killed by their partners or family members — that is, on average 137 women a day died at the hands of those closest to them. Overall, 60% of all intentional killings of women take place precisely in the “private” space of close relationships, while among men this figure is only 11%.

War only sharpens this vulnerability. The first three months of 2026 were the deadliest winter for women and girls in Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion: from January to March alone, 199 women and girls were killed — more than in the same period of 2023, 2024 and 2025.

In a situation of prolonged stress, dependence or isolation, the psyche often tries not to break the attachment but to preserve it at any cost, because losing the relationship can be experienced as an even greater threat than the violence itself. A person may at the same time fear the abuser, depend on them, remember moments of closeness and hope that things will change. The psyche naturally seeks support in the people nearby — even when it is precisely these relationships that cause pain.

When a society lives in a state of prolonged danger, support systems are overloaded and the number of crisis situations keeps growing, one’s own pain starts to seem not serious enough against the background of the daily threat. The psyche gradually gets used to constant tension, loss and exhaustion, and the line between dangerous and ordinary begins to blur.

The price of silence and the right to a voice

Violence does not destroy only at the moment it is committed. It gradually changes the way a person experiences their own body, closeness, safety, trust and the very possibility of being among other people without fear.

A prolonged experience of danger rebuilds the nervous system around survival. If the environment is unpredictable or threatening, the body adapts to constant tension. Reactions that helped a person survive during violence can persist even after the dangerous situation is over. That is why a person may understand rationally that it is all over, yet go on living physically and emotionally as if the threat had never gone away.

Hypervigilance is a state in which the psyche continuously scans the environment for threats. A person begins to over-control their own words, reactions and emotions, to try to predict other people’s behaviour or to avoid any potential conflict. Over time this exhausts both the psyche and the body.

Traumatic experience is not integrated into the psyche as a whole and coherent story. The psyche may fragment what was lived through, separating the ability to function in everyday life from the parts of experience linked to fear or pain. That is why survivors may understand that violence happened and yet seem not to feel it fully, or may speak about it in fragments, without emotion or with atypical emotional expression. Dissociation becomes the psyche’s way of protecting a person from experiences that are too painful or unbearable.

Constant adjustment to danger, the need to suppress one’s own reactions, doubts about one’s own experience and prolonged devaluation gradually destroy the sense of inner support. A person stops trusting their own feelings.

That is why shame occupies a special place in the experience of violence — not only as an emotion, but as a form of inner suppression of one’s own “self”. Shame makes a person deny themselves the right to anger, protection, support or even to acknowledging what they went through as real.

For members of stigmatised groups this is intensified by previous experiences of discrimination, homophobia, transphobia or social exclusion. Social devaluation deepens the pain, reinforces isolation and pushes a person even further away from their own voice and their right to support.

When a person experiences being unable to influence their situation for so long, they gradually stop believing in their own ability to change anything, even when a way out already exists. This leads to a state of learned helplessness. The most dangerous weapon of the oppressor is the mind of a person who has come to believe in their own inferiority.

Regaining one’s voice is a fundamental necessity for preserving the integrity of one’s own “self”. To say one’s true word means to regain one’s agency. When a person or a community stops looking at themselves solely through the eyes of the system that devalued them, it becomes possible to gradually rebuild support: through boundaries, connections, a language for describing one’s own experience and the ability to be visible without shame.

The process of recovery is not purely individual. The support and solidarity of communities become not only emotional support but also a way of regaining agency after the experience of dehumanisation. The trauma of violence isolates, forces silence and makes a person doubt their own reality — which is why the presence of another person able to bear and acknowledge someone else’s pain becomes one of the key conditions for recovery. Pain that has a witness gradually stops being only an inner burden and begins to integrate into a coherent story about oneself.

Collective reflection plays a special role in this process. The appearance of words to describe violence, discrimination or trauma often becomes a turning point: a person stops seeing their own experience as a personal flaw and begins to see the connection between their story and wider social contexts.

Resistance to dehumanisation often begins not with great revolutions, but with gradually reclaiming the right to exist grounded in reality:

calling things by their names;
no longer devaluing one’s own pain;
setting boundaries;
asking for help.

When an experience that remained “unspeakable” finds a place in a shared language, it stops existing only as chaotic feelings. And it is in this possibility — to speak about what one went through in one’s own words, to recognise oneself in the experience of others and no longer to remain alone with one’s pain — that the ability to go on living beyond the logic of violence is gradually born: as a person or a community reclaiming the right to memory, agency and a future.

We are always here to help.

The Insight NGO team

Legal help Psychological help

Written by:

Mykyta Karimov — psychologist and head of the psychological service of Insight NGO.
Sofiia Rybalchenko — psychologist at Insight NGO.

The project is implemented within the EMPOWER project, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) together with the European Union and implemented by GIZ Ukraine.

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