Domestic fear beyond traumatic terror: understanding mothers’ everyday experiences of recurring fear in the context of domestic violence

Abstract

This article offers an empirical critique of trauma-informed fear models by documenting how mothers experienced repetitive fear of domestic violence in France. I challenge the reduction of victims’ responses to traumatic ‘terror’ and suggest that the neurological fear models which circulate in training and advocacy discourses fail to acknowledge the domestic setting and the resources on which they draw to respond to fear. Analysing ethnographic data, the article adopts a structural theory of emotion and domestic violence. I draw on Jack Barbalet’s notion of fear containment and rework his model by applying it to non-elite and individual mothers through what I call ‘instrumental’ counterchallenge and submissiveness. I show that their fear practices are combined with fear containment. The article analyses fear as an occasion for knowledge acquisition and an auxiliary for instrumental action. The article highlights the hidden fear responses that go unnoticed when analysis prominently relies on neurological trauma: mothers act on their fears to confirm or overrule fearful anticipations and they experience fear as an occasion for knowledge acquisition to guide future action.