CHRONIC VICTIMIZATION AND PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTRESS: A THEMATIC ANALYSIS OF STREET-BEGGING WOMEN IN PAKISTAN

Abstract

Street begging is one of the most visible yet least studied forms of chronic marginalization in Pakistani society and the psychological toll of the violence that accompanies it remains largely absent from national research. Most existing accounts of begging in Pakistan are descriptive or legal in orientation, cataloguing its scale or debating its criminalization, while saying almost nothing about the inner psychological world of the people who beg. This qualitative study addressed that gap by examining how physical abuse and sexual violence shape post-traumatic stress symptoms among women who beg on the streets of Jhang, Punjab. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted in Punjabi and Urdu with six participants and transcripts were analyzed using Braun and Clarke's (2006) thematic analysis, informed by Herman's (1992) complex trauma model and Bronfenbrenner's (1979) ecological systems framework. Analysis yielded eight psychological themes, chronic physical abuse, intrusive re-experiencing, emotional numbing, hypervigilance, sleep disturbance, social isolation, internalized shame and normalized suffering, alongside three structural themes: poverty, institutional abandonment and gender inequality. Findings suggest that trauma in this population is continuous rather than episodic, sustained by overlapping economic deprivation, unresponsive institutions and a gendered cultural order that renders women's suffering invisible. Rather than functioning as isolated symptoms, these themes formed a closed system in which each form of distress reinforced the others, leaving participants with few internal or external resources for recovery. The study concludes that post-traumatic stress among street beggars should be understood as a social production rather than a private psychiatric event and offers recommendations for trauma-informed outreach, legal reform and community-based intervention that take this structural embeddedness seriously.