We tend to think of sexual violence through the lenses of survivors or of institutions. On one side, the focus is on survivors, their pain, trauma, resilience, and the demand for justice. On the other side, we discuss the police, courts, law, and the places where the incident took place as failures that allowed it to happen. Both conversations are necessary when discussing violence. But there is another social space between these conversations that is often given very little attention. The people who become witnesses to other people’s trauma. What is happening to them? This is not about legal witnesses, but about becoming social witnesses. The people in survivors’ close networks, like family, friends, partners, etc.

 Listening to a survivor, mostly a woman, narrate their experience of sexual violence will put us through emotions we may not even be aware of. Most of the survivors carry that experience and pain for a long time before sharing it. That is why society often acknowledges the courage to speak about violence. But when they share this with another person, it can’t remain simply as a story itself. The disclosure and the realisation of it transform into the listener’s own social world. Hence, even when the conversation ends, consequences do not.

Social life is built through various kinds of interactions. Everyday interactions are sustained by shared assumptions about who people are and how they should be treated (Goffman, 1959). We live within familiar social spaces with a relatively good understanding of our social circle within them, such as friends, neighbours, relatives, colleagues, and teachers, whereas some testimonies unsettle this. If the survivor and the alleged perpetrator belong in our social spaces, it starts to alter the listener’s consciousness. Someone who was a friend or a trusted person may now be someone the listener cannot stand. Even casual interactions become morally charged. Neutrality, even in social events, becomes difficult and, at times, impossible. Everything changes without any visible change. This shift shows that trauma does not solely remain confined to those who experienced the violence. It enters other relationships through testimonies. It reorganises social interactions, trust, and how people navigate their everyday spaces. The violence happened once, but it entered the afterlife in social spaces.

This afterlife mostly belongs to the listener who becomes a social witness to the violence. Therefore, it is rarely recognised and leaves no visible evidence. It unfolds quietly within silences, conversations, one’s own productivity, and altered interpersonal relationships. The listener starts observing who offers support and who remains neutral or sceptical. Familiar meetings carry emotional weight. Greeting them with a smile becomes uncomfortable. It reconfigures communities based on its knowledge of them, particularly when the violence happens within close social networks rather than among strangers. This is not to evaluate the range of violence. But media reports allow us a distance to express our emotions, stand with the survivors, and move on with our lives. But when it happens in our own networks, that distance disappears, and violence becomes more than abstract. It invades the moral terrain of everyday life. Then sociological discussions become inevitable.

Veena Das (2007)stated that violence rarely ends once it happens. Rather, it descends into everyday life, shaping how those involved continue to love, think, speak and relate to one another. Survivors’ testimonies to others are one way this happens. Even if it is a small, uncomfortable event in the past, its social consequences continue to weave into the present. Hence, being a listener is not merely creating a safe space for the survivor; it also requires a form of emotional work, which sociology has rarely explored. The concept of emotional labour explains that managing feelings in professional settings while listening to another person’s trauma demands a different form of labour (Hochschild, 1983). The listener must show compassion and reassurance, remain present without making the survivor feel bad, and promise justice. It becomes hard for the listener to even say “Yes, I understand” and to realise that no words can undo what has happened.

Since the listener is not the primary subject of the violence, this emotional labour remains invisible. The idea is not to do so or to shift attention away from the survivor. The point is to recognise that such disclosures are creating new social spaces, relationships and ethical responsibilities. Clearly, any of these responsibilities is the same as carrying the trauma of a survivor. Trauma is not something that can be transferred. What we share is knowledge, which has consequences. Once listen to another person’s trauma, it is impossible to unknow it. Rather, the listener starts evaluating people based on their reactions to the incident while questioning the notions of trust, intimacy and safety. This is why sharing the trauma of such violence goes beyond mere communication, but is a redistribution of moral responsibility. 

Public responses towards delayed disclosures often indicate suspicion, rooted in patriarchy, even in subtle ways. People often ask Why speak now? What do they want now? Why do they remain silent till now, by overlooking the social conditions that demand that silence in the first place? Survivors start considering the anticipatory victim blaming, institutional indifference, fear of abandonment, damaged reputations, and so on, which makes opening up very difficult. Most importantly, recovering from the trauma itself takes time. So, when they decide to speak about it, they are inviting the listener also into that difficult ethical encounter with that past event.  There, the survivor and the listener become vulnerable because humans are basically relational beings (Butler, 2004). When people recognise this shared vulnerability and dependence, ethical life becomes real. Listening to a survivor’s testimony exposes this. The listener is transforming because a fellow human’s vulnerability is now demanding an ethical response from them, though they haven’t experienced the violence.

There is another dimension that a sociological imagination can explain. Perhaps this dimension puts the listener, as a social witness, in greater difficulty. Gordon (2008) explains that some social experiences can haunt communities even after they are officially over. So, violence does not disappear but exists even after the case is closed or people have moved on. It exists in relationships, places and memories, even if the survivor believes they got justice. This is a weight the listener has to carry. They have to keep living with this haunting. The changes will follow them everywhere, often triggering helplessness if it is a close network. This raises questions about being righteous, supporting the victim, and even questioning their agency to evaluate the justice the survivor thinks is enough. And as sociologists, this asks an uncomfortable question: why haven’t we paid enough attention to this?

Testimonies may seem to remain between two individuals. But it is a social event itself. It navigates through social networks of obligation, trust, memory and invisibly reorganising social and moral worlds. Recognising this process is not to reduce survivors’ experience, but to expand people’s understanding of violence as a relational incident and how its consequences go beyond the moment of assault. Violence and its testimonies have the potential to damage every social relationship people are in.

And listening is not only a simple act of empathy, but also a sociological event. Once a person becomes the listener, they are discovering another person’s trauma and witnessing it. They have to continue living in the same places where the violence has taken place, by realising nothing is innocent there. Doing that, the listener acquires a scarred moral depth, and even their social world itself has changed.

References

Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialisation of human feeling. University of California Press.

Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. Verso.

Das, V. (2007). Life and words: Violence and the descent into the ordinary. University of California Press.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Gordon, A. F. (2008). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination (2nd ed.). University of Minnesota Press.

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Suadath V is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Economic and Social Studies, Hyderabad.