My relationship to the issue of violence against women did not begin as an academic interest.
Years ago, my international human rights work brought me into direct contact with cases involving the forced prostitution and sexual exploitation of children. Some of what I encountered was difficult to absorb and impossible to forget. These were not abstractions about trafficking or human rights violations. They were children whose bodies had become sites of coercion, violence, profit, and control, often through the actions of adults and systems that should have protected them. I learned details of what had been done to them that I still carry with me.
The work changed something in me. It stripped away any comfortable distance I might have maintained from the realities of sexual violence and forced me to confront what human beings are capable of doing to the vulnerable, and how easily institutions, cultures, and economies can create conditions in which exploitation becomes possible, profitable, and hidden.
Later, through my work in spiritual direction, I accompanied women whose lives had been affected by domestic violence. I listened as they tried to make sense not only of what had happened to them, but of what the violence had done to their relationship with themselves, the world and God. Questions of trust, identity, agency, embodiment, belonging, intimacy, meaning, and the future were not secondary to their experience. They were woven through it.
The issue has also remained close to me through my adult daughter, a licensed clinical social worker who works with victims of domestic violence. Our conversations over the years have deepened my awareness of both the complexity of this work and the realities women face as they navigate violence, safety, relationships, institutions, and the difficult work of rebuilding a life.
When I began developing the field of Existential Health, I made a commitment to myself that violence against women would not become a peripheral application of the field, addressed occasionally after its central concepts had already been established. It would be one of the realities against which the field itself must be tested.
A field concerned with the human relationship to meaning, identity, agency, embodiment, belonging, mortality, trust, and participation in life cannot take violence against women seriously only as a matter of physical safety or psychological trauma, essential as those dimensions are. It must also ask what violence does to a person’s relationship with being alive, what conditions make violence and domination possible, and what kinds of relationships, communities, institutions, and cultures make human freedom more inhabitable.
This article is part of fulfilling that commitment.
There are many ways to describe the harm of violence against women. We can describe physical injury, sexual violation, coercive control, psychological trauma, economic dependence, disrupted relationships, depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and the long process by which survivors attempt to rebuild their lives. Decades of work in medicine, psychology, social science, law, advocacy, and trauma studies have given us increasingly sophisticated ways of understanding these consequences.
Existential Health begins with a somewhat different question.
What does violence do to a person’s relationship with existence itself?
The question initially sounds abstract beside the concrete realities of assault, rape, domestic abuse, stalking, harassment, coercion, intimidation, and murder. But the existential consequences are anything but abstract. They can be found in the ordinary details of a life: which street someone takes home, whether she feels comfortable being alone with a man she does not know, what happens inside her when footsteps approach from behind, whether she trusts her perception that something is wrong, whether she can say no without calculating the consequences, whether intimacy feels possible without vigilance, whether her own body still feels like somewhere she belongs.
Violence can injure the body, but its reach does not necessarily stop at the body’s surface. It can alter the meanings attached to places, relationships, choices, memories, possibilities, and the future. A bedroom can become threatening. A familiar neighborhood can acquire danger. Affection can become difficult to distinguish from control. Dependence can feel perilous. Attention can produce apprehension rather than pleasure. The body itself can become something to monitor, conceal, protect, distrust, or escape.
In this sense, violence can do more than produce suffering within a person. It can change the world the person experiences.
This matters for Existential Health because our lives are not lived entirely inside us. We exist in relationship with bodies, people, places, institutions, histories, cultures, expectations, and possibilities. Meaning emerges through these relationships. So do belonging, identity, trust, agency, and freedom. When harm enters this relational field, it can alter far more than an individual’s psychological state. It can reorganize the conditions through which life itself is encountered.
A person who has experienced such harm can still be standing in the same room, walking through the same city, inhabiting the same body, interacting with the same people, and performing the same daily routines. From the outside, much of the world appears unchanged. Experientially, however, she can inhabit a very different world.
The door now needs to be locked twice. The parking lot requires attention. A raised voice changes the atmosphere of a room. A text unanswered for too long carries consequences. The location of an exit becomes relevant. Someone asking, “Where are you?” may no longer sound like an innocent question. The body registers information before conscious thought has had time to interpret it. Ordinary life becomes populated with calculations that others may never have to make.
This is one reason violence cannot be understood only as an isolated event that occurred at a particular moment in the past. Its existential consequences may continue through the meanings, expectations, adaptations, and possibilities that organize life afterward. What happened yesterday can become part of how tomorrow is anticipated.
There is another dimension that makes violence against women especially important for the field of Existential Health. Its effects extend beyond those who have experienced it directly. The possibility of harm can itself become part of the environment in which girls learn to inhabit the world.
They learn precautions before they fully understand why those precautions are necessary. Over time, they exchange information about where not to walk, whom not to trust, how to hold keys, when to share their location, how much to drink, which transportation feels safer, whether to confront someone, and when politeness itself can become dangerous.
These practices vary enormously across cultures, communities, social classes, racial and economic realities, and individual circumstances. They should not be universalized into a single female experience. But across many societies, the threat of male violence becomes one of the realities women must learn to negotiate.
This means that threat can become more than an interpersonal concern. It can become part of the existential environment.
An existential environment is made of the conditions that shape what kinds of lives seem possible, what risks must be considered, whose perceptions are trusted, where someone can belong, how freely a person can move, and how much of herself she can safely bring into the world. These conditions are created not only by individuals but also by families, communities, workplaces, religious institutions, legal systems, economies, digital environments, and cultures.
From this perspective, violence against women reaches directly into the territory of Existential Health.
The body may cease to feel like a secure place from which to inhabit the world, while choices that once seemed ordinary become constrained by calculations of threat. Experiences of coercion can impose meanings upon identity that a person never chose for herself, and sustained manipulation can weaken confidence in her own perception of what is happening.
The disruption extends outward into relationships and the future. Families and communities may protect perpetrators or make disclosure costly, turning belonging itself into something uncertain. Intimacy can become complicated when vulnerability has previously been exploited, and freedom contracts as more possibilities must be evaluated through the lens of danger. Assumptions about love, justice, goodness, and the reliability of the world may no longer hold together as they once did. Even the future can become difficult to imagine when so much energy is required simply to negotiate the conditions of the present.
None of this means that women who experience violence are permanently damaged, existentially incapacitated, or defined by what happened to them. Such assumptions reproduce another form of reduction. People survive violence in extraordinarily different ways. Some experience profound and lasting disruption. Others rebuild lives marked by agency, intimacy, purpose, trust, and meaning. Many carry both injury and strength, fear and freedom, grief and possibility at the same time. No framework should tell survivors what their experience is supposed to mean.
An existential perspective asks us to examine the relationship between a person and the conditions under which she is attempting to live. Instead of locating the entire problem within the survivor and asking how she can become functional again, we can also examine the world to which she is being asked to return.
Is it safe enough for trust?
Does it make room for agency?
Will her perception be taken seriously? What happens when she speaks rather than remains silent?
Are her boundaries respected without retaliation? Does her body belong unquestionably to her?
Can relationships accommodate her full presence without requiring self-surrender?
And does the future contain possibilities beyond the continual management of danger?
These are not only psychological questions. They are existential, relational, cultural, institutional, and political questions because the answers depend partly upon the kind of world surrounding the person.
This leads toward a larger proposition the field must be willing to make: existential health is not solely an individual achievement. It is partly a public condition.
A society can create environments that strengthen agency, belonging, dignity, trust, embodiment, meaning, and possibility. It can also create conditions that systematically weaken them. When these dimensions are treated entirely as matters of individual resilience, mindset, spirituality, or personal development, we risk asking people to adapt themselves to environments that are themselves injurious.
Violence against women makes that contradiction difficult to ignore.
Agency means little when exercising it carries punishment, and self-trust is difficult to sustain within institutions that repeatedly teach people to doubt their own perceptions. Belonging becomes compromised when silence is the price of remaining included, just as embodiment takes on a different meaning when the body itself becomes a site of domination.
Freedom presents the larger challenge. It cannot be measured only by the rights people formally possess. We also have to consider the conditions under which those rights can actually be exercised, including the unequal burden carried by those who must continually calculate the possibility of harm.
The question is larger than why violence against women is wrong. Its wrongness does not require a new philosophical justification. What matters here is what it reveals about the conditions necessary for a person to inhabit life as her own.
To understand that, we have to begin with the place where domination becomes most immediate: the body.
Before we have a philosophy of life, a religious worldview, a political identity, or even a developed understanding of ourselves, we have a body. We encounter existence through it. Hunger, warmth, pain, pleasure, exhaustion, attraction, fear, movement, touch, illness, sexuality, vulnerability, and desire are not secondary additions to an otherwise abstract self. They are among the primary ways we experience being alive.
The body is the first place we live.
This is why violence against women has such profound existential significance. Physical and sexual harm do not simply happen to the body as though the body were an object belonging to a self located somewhere else. The violation occurs at the very threshold through which a person encounters the world. When that threshold is breached, the consequences can reach into the person’s relationship with existence itself.
Ordinarily, we move through much of life without consciously thinking about our bodies. We reach for a glass, walk through a doorway, sit beside another person, fall asleep, undress, shower, exercise, make love, or cross a room without needing to observe ourselves performing these actions. There is a kind of unselfconscious participation in being embodied. The body allows us to enter the world without requiring our constant attention.
Violence can interrupt this ordinary relationship.
A body that was once simply lived through may become a body that must constantly be monitored. Sensations acquire new significance. Proximity becomes information. Touch requires assessment. A sound behind the body can produce an immediate response. Sexual intimacy may awaken memories or reactions that seem to arrive before conscious thought. Certain positions, smells, rooms, gestures, tones of voice, or forms of physical contact can suddenly carry meanings that were not there before.
The body remembers in ways that do not always submit themselves to explanation.
This is one reason it can be misleading to imagine recovery from violence primarily as changing one’s thoughts about what happened. The disruption can exist at a more elemental level. A person can intellectually understand that she is currently safe while her body continues to respond as though danger remains present. She can know that the person beside her is trustworthy and still experience fear when touched unexpectedly. She can understand that an assault was not her responsibility and still feel estranged from the body in which it occurred.
There can be a painful division between knowing and inhabiting.
Existential Health is concerned with that division because being embodied is not simply a medical condition. It is a fundamental dimension of existence. We do not merely possess bodies. We experience ourselves, other people, space, vulnerability, pleasure, mortality, and possibility through them. When violence changes someone’s relationship with her body, it can therefore alter one of the most basic structures of her participation in life.
For women, this question also exists within a larger cultural history in which the female body has frequently been treated as something available for judgment, regulation, possession, exchange, discipline, sexualization, reproduction, and control. Long before an individual act of violence occurs, many girls learn that their bodies will be interpreted by other people.
Clothing is interpreted as communicating something, sexuality becomes subject to evaluation, and attractiveness can influence how a woman is treated. Even personal boundaries may be treated as negotiable rather than simply respected, while reproductive capacities can become matters of family, religious, medical, or political concern.
The body becomes personal and public at the same time.
This does not mean embodiment is experienced primarily through threat, nor should its complexity…
