When Violence Looks Normal
Kaisa Vaittinen
Stereotypes decide which violence we recognize — and which we let dissolve into the normal order. A field guide to coercive control, the ideal-victim script, the Nordic paradox, DARVO and the workplace mirror.
Violence can go unrecognized for two reasons. It can break a stereotype so completely that no one expects it to exist. It can fit a stereotype so neatly that it dissolves into the normal order of things.
The same logic runs through intimate partner violence and through power abuse at work. Violence is never recognized in a vacuum. It is read through cultural expectations: who gets to be violent, who gets to be a victim, what counts as "real" violence, and what kind of suffering looks credible.
Violence is recognized easily when it matches a stereotype. Violence that breaks the stereotype stays hidden because no one expects it. Violence that follows the stereotype can also stay hidden, but for the opposite reason. It looks too familiar to be seen.
What this essay argues
- Stereotypes operate as perceptual filters before any interpretation begins.
- A four-field map of perpetrator and form predicts which violence stays invisible.
- Coercive control names a structure of power, not a series of incidents.
- The "good victim" script makes the most traumatized the least credible.
- DARVO weaponizes calmness against those whose nervous systems were under threat.
- Recognizing violence at work uses the same indicators as recognizing it at home.
- Normalization, not concealment, is what lets most violence stay in plain sight.
Stereotypes are perceptual systems
A stereotype is a cultural assumption about what a typical member of a group is like. It shapes what we perceive before we have studied the situation. Social psychologists have shown that stereotypes guide attention, memory, interpretation, and causal reasoning at the perceptual stage itself.
In intimate partner violence, this means something concrete. A helper, an authority, a friend, or a colleague looks at the situation through assumptions their culture has taught them. A stereotype works as a filter in two directions. It amplifies what fits the assumption. It dampens what breaks it.
Bates and colleagues (2019) showed experimentally that violence against male victims was recognized less and seen as more acceptable than equivalent violence against female victims. In the other direction, psychological violence against women is documented as hard to recognize when the perpetrator presents as calm and rational (Stark 2007).
Goodwill and training can reduce the impact of stereotypes but not eliminate it. The professional's responsibility is to recognize their own perceptions and to ask, systematically, what they might be missing. Blind spots are invisible to those whose eyes contain them.
A four-field map: which violence the culture expects to see
The effect of stereotypes can be illustrated through a four-field map. This is a perceptual model, not a statistical claim. It describes what kind of violence the culture expects to see and what kind it expects to be absent.
Lower-left (man physically violent): the perpetrator may not appear shaken; he can seem "reasonable" in a way that makes the victim less credible. Upper-right (woman physically violent against a man): collides with a cultural image that does not include male victimhood; men face humour or dismissal even in helping contexts (Taylor et al. 2022). Upper-left (woman emotionally violent): seen either as expected or overinterpreted; the individual experience disappears in both readings. Lower-right (man emotionally violent): hardest to recognize, because the perpetrator presents as calm and logical while his partner can appear unstable.
The same act receives different recognition depending on which cell of the map it falls into. The stereotype acts as a gatekeeper regardless of gender.
Statistics and individual experience
Intimate partner violence is a gendered phenomenon. According to The Lancet (Sardinha et al. 2022), 27% of ever-partnered women aged 15-49 globally have experienced physical or sexual intimate partner violence in their lifetime. Statistics Finland (2024) reports 13,000 family- and intimate-partner crimes that came to authorities; 74% of adult victims were women, and three-quarters of suspects were men. According to THL (2024), all but one of the homicides committed by current or former spouses in Finland were against women.
Recognizing the gendered nature of this violence matters because prevention requires knowledge of where the phenomenon occurs. At the same time, statistics describe only the structural picture. In an individual relationship or workplace, the statistical picture does not automatically determine who is the perpetrator and who is the victim. A culture's collective recognition system is not the same thing as the truth of an individual situation.
The Nordic paradox
Gracia and Merlo (2016) named the paradox: the Nordic countries are among the most gender-equal in the world, while at the same time intimate partner violence against women in these countries is reported as exceptionally high. The stronger a society's narrative about its own progressiveness, the harder it becomes to see what does not fit that narrative. Gender equality at the institutional level can produce a collective blind spot for violence in the private sphere.
Psychological violence and coercive control
Psychological violence begins to separate from ordinary relational difficulty when the behaviour forms a recurring system of power and control. This is the core of Evan Stark's (2007) concept of coercive control. Hamberger and colleagues (2017) name three central elements: the perpetrator's behaviour is intentional; the target experiences the control as harmful; the perpetrator uses credible threat to maintain it.
Coercive control shows up in patterns: restricting freedom of movement, continuous monitoring, economic control, verbal degradation, threats related to children or finances, distorting reality (gaslighting), cycles of reward and punishment, and isolation from supportive relationships. Two adults who argue, even harshly, in a relationship in which both can leave and answer back, are in a different situation from one in which one party gradually loses their autonomy through a sustained system of control. The conceptual difference between conflict and control is structural.
The good victim who does not exist
The cultural script of the "good victim" demands consistency, calmness, articulate testimony, no anger toward the perpetrator, and a clear chronology. None of this is the typical condition of a person traumatized by violence. As a result of trauma (van der Kolk 2014), a person may be hyperaroused, reactive, ashamed, dissociative, or inconsistent, and their memory may be fragmented. Trauma makes a person look exactly like someone easy to disbelieve.
Shame deepens this mechanism. Tangney and Dearing (2002) distinguish shame from guilt: shame moves a person toward silence and concealment. Scheff (1988) described shame as a social control system that drives people toward norms before anyone has to punish openly. The cultural script for a credible victim corresponds almost exactly to a person who has not been seriously traumatized — one of the most cruel double binds in the helping system.
DARVO
When the target tries to name the violence or seek help, the perpetrator tends to deny what happened, attack the target's credibility, and present themselves as the wronged party. This mechanism is described by DARVO: deny, attack, reverse victim and offender (Harsey & Freyd 2020). DARVO is distinguished by all three elements appearing together in a way structured to discredit the target.
As a counterweight, researchers propose two principles: slow down assessment, and look at patterns. Examine the content of the calm narration rather than its tone, and compare it with what the target has described.
Emotional dysregulation, impulsivity, and responsibility
Not all violence is part of coercive control. Some violence is reactive and tied to the perpetrator's own emotional regulation problems, substance use, or trauma history. Maloney and colleagues' meta-analysis (2023) of 62 samples and over 250 effect sizes showed a statistically significant association between emotional regulation difficulties and IPV perpetration that did not vary by gender. Foran and O'Leary (2008) showed alcohol was significantly associated with IPV perpetration in both men and women, with a larger effect in men.
Emotional dysregulation explains why a person does not pause. Responsibility for the act stays with the perpetrator. Babcock, Green and Robie's meta-analysis (2004) of perpetrator treatment programs showed effects are typically small.
The same logic at work
The same pattern repeats outside intimate relationships. Workplace bullying research defines bullying through three elements: recurring harmful behaviour, duration over time, and a power imbalance in which the target cannot defend themselves on equal terms (Einarsen et al. 2020). The ILO Convention C190 (2019) recognizes workplace violence and harassment as a broad category of unacceptable behaviours.
Cortina's selective incivility theory (2008) proposes that ostensibly general rudeness can function as a modern form of discrimination. Small acts can be significant in their cumulative effect, when they recur and target systematically. In expert organizations these questions are particularly difficult, because those exercising power are often intellectually capable and economically valuable. They can present their behaviour as strategy, leadership, or demanding standards in a way the organization will accept.
Normalization: when violence looks like the order of the world
Violence stays hidden for two reasons. Sometimes it is concealed. Just as often it is in plain sight but interpreted as normal. This is just how relationships are. Men are like that. He's just got a temper. There are surely two sides to it. This is how violence becomes scenery.
Normalization works without explicit commands. A person learns what not to say. They begin to edit their own narrative before anyone has asked. The first step in dismantling normalization is conceptual. The emergence of the concept of coercive control is an example. With the concept, the same experience became recognizable, shareable, and the object of research.
What should be seen
Recognition requires looking at the whole picture. The key questions are few. Who is afraid in the situation? Whose nervous system, body, and behaviour suggest sustained threat? Whose reality is treated as real? Whose calm corresponds to control of the situation, not to its absence? Who is seen as believable, and on what basis? Who has to prove that their experience deserves to be taken seriously?
Stereotypes determine what we count as violence. Recognizing them as guides of perception is the precondition for being able to recognize violence even when it does not look familiar. Violence is often in plain sight, but its name has been changed to something else: love, argument, demanding standards, leadership, temperament. Recognizing it begins where the normal stops looking self-evident.
References
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- Bates, E. A., Kaye, L. K., Pennington, C. R. & Hamlin, I. (2019). What about the Male Victims? Sex Roles, 81, 1-15.
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- van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Viking.