When Every Home Became a Chamber of Confinement

 When Every Home Became a Chamber of Confinement

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced the world into lockdown, streets fell silent, offices shut their doors, and families retreated within the sanctity of the home, in the name of safety. But for countless women, “home” did not mean sanctuary—it became a prison, a torture chamber, or a concentration chamber. A site of terror. A sealed chamber of confinement, echoing with the violence of men who now had unrestricted access to their victims.

During those months, I was inundated with calls and messages from women—some desperate, others resigned. Each voice carried a different kind of fear, but all shared a common thread: they were trapped with their abusers, and the outside world had disappeared. Their options were few, and their pleas felt like cries into an abyss. Some of the episodes of violence were so painful that I felt helpless.

Courts were closed. Any support became inaccessible. No one around to help. One cannot go out to seek help from family, friends, or neighbors. Even otherwise, stigma has prevented many women from speaking up or calling for help in such matters.

As a lawyer and a social worker, I have long engaged with violence in its many forms, but something about this moment felt distinctly heavier, more suffocating. The volume, the intensity, and the utter helplessness struck with an unprecedented force. I could not understand what had happened and how I should respond to the gravity of the situation.  

I had no framework for the sheer collapse of the protective systems that women so precariously rely on. No tools seemed adequate. No intervention felt swift or strong enough. The anxiety and futility of being helpless overtook me. Every woman I talked to enhanced my anger against the system and society. The horror of atrocities beyond the human realm shook my humanity.

Some stories were so brutal that they left me shaking, sleepless. The weight of those disclosures settled into my chest, pressing heavily with each retelling. The feeling of impotence—of knowing and yet being unable to act with immediacy—was psychologically paralyzing. I found myself haunted not only by their pain, but by my own. Their stories resurrected old ghosts: my own experiences as a victim and survivor of violence. I have known what it feels like to be unheard, unseen, and dismissed. I recognized the silence on the other end of the phone when words failed. The pauses between breaths, when fear clutches the throat. The tears of pity, the melancholy of the universe, engulfed me again and again, reminding me of the horrors of my own past as a victim and a survivor of violence.  

The sense of experience of drowning in the pain and sufferings and sheer immediacy of the terrifying moment nullifies the existence of the trapped body and spirit. I was forced to confront a terrifying realization of how homes, the so-called safe spaces, for many, become chambers of unspeakable suffering. The term "lockdown" began to feel less like a health mandate and more like a state-sanctioned trap.

In the midst of it all, I began to question the very structure of our society. What kind of world have we built where a crisis, meant to preserve life, so casually sacrifices the lives of the most vulnerable behind closed doors? The metaphor that kept surfacing in my mind was unsettling but accurate: had every home become a kind of concentration chamber? A place where bodies were controlled, confined, and broken—psychologically and physically—without witness or escape?

The mind, desperate for solace, searched for antidotes—distractions, reassurances, rationalizations. But nothing offered clarity. In fact, the very act of trying to process the violence—while being surrounded by it, unable to stop it—only intensified my inner disquiet. My thoughts raced. And each new story brought another layer of anguish. It was not simply a professional crisis—it was a moral and existential one.

I tried to hold space for their voices, knowing that many of them were struggling even to find language to describe their pain. The trauma was too deep, too fresh. And not all could afford the emotional cost of telling the whole story. Some had no time, no privacy, no faith that it would matter. I listened—fully, quietly—but I often felt inadequate. I stood bare before their vulnerability, my own scars no shield against the enormity of theirs.

These interactions were more than cases or complaints. They were testaments to the terrible things human beings can do to one another—and how systemic neglect allows that terror to thrive. We often imagine violence as isolated, as personal pathology, but it is also deeply structural. It flourishes where institutions are indifferent, where silence is rewarded, and where patriarchy is allowed to dominate unchecked.

The memories of those months linger like smoke in the lungs. I fear they will never fully leave me—or the women who lived them. They have become a dark residue in our collective memory, a permanent tear in the fabric of time. A hole in the moral ozone layer of our shared history. Through that rupture, what seeps in is not only the memory of a horrific past, but a warning: when society prioritizes safety in abstraction without considering whose safety is truly being protected, we risk repeating these cruelties over and over again.

We cannot afford to forget what the lockdown revealed: that for too many, the greatest danger was not outside, but within the walls of their own homes. And if we continue to turn away, to relegate domestic violence to the private sphere, we become complicit in that suffering. We owe it to the witnesses, the survivors, and the silenced to listen, to act, and to refuse to accept this as normal.