Culture often recognises harm long before institutions know how to measure it. From mythology to modern psychology, indirect and relational aggression has been widely observed, yet remains largely invisible to our justice system. That blind spot has consequences.

What Culture Sees Before the Law Can Name

Long before institutions learn how to measure a problem, cultures explore it informally.

They do so imperfectly and sometimes cruelly, through myth, literature, theatre, and popular entertainment. These cultural artefacts exaggerate, simplify, and moralise. They are not evidence. They are not diagnostics for individuals. They lack the rigor of scientific analysis and investigation. But they perform an important social function: they identify patterns of behaviour that are sufficiently recognisable to be named, narrated, and remembered.

In this sense, fiction often functions as a form of cultural diagnosis. It tells us what kinds of power exist, how harm can be inflicted, and the patterns of behaviour that institutions should be aware of.

This article begins there – not because culture should replace scientific enquiry, evidence or investigation, but because it often points to social and cultural truths long recognised through mythology and storytelling.

Myth has lost its status as truth, but not its capacity to reveal what people recognise as real.

Cultural recognition of indirect harm

Across centuries and genres, one pattern recurs with striking consistency: harm that is inflicted indirectly, through relationships, reputation, and third parties rather than through overt force.

Ancient Greek mythology is filled with figures who exercise power not through physical dominance but through jealousy, punishment, social exclusion, and the manipulation of others. Hera, for example, rarely confronts Zeus directly; her power is expressed through retaliation against rivals and intermediaries. These stories were not manuals for judging women. They were early recognitions that power can be exercised without a blow being struck.

Shakespeare gives us Lady Macbeth, who never wields the dagger herself. Instead, she coerces through intimacy – questioning identity, invoking shame, and exploiting her husband’s self‑conception. Shakespeare is not making a claim about women as a class. He is exploring how ambition and violence can be outsourced when direct action is socially constrained.

Modern popular culture continues this thread. Regina George in Mean Girls is not physically violent. Her dominance comes from gossip, exclusion, and narrative control – what social psychologists now call relational aggression. The character resonates because audiences immediately recognise the behaviour, not because they believe all girls behave this way.

Film noir’s femme fatale, the honey trap, and the black widow are exaggerations, often misogynistic ones. They have also caused harm by flattening women into caricatures. But their persistence across time and culture reflects a widely recognised anxiety: that social, sexual, and reputational leverage can be used to entrap, destroy, or coerce without visible force.

More recently, public reactions to high‑profile relationship disputes – most notably the Depp–Heard trial – demonstrated how quickly these familiar narrative templates are activated. This observation is not a legal judgment about any individual. It is a cultural fact about how people recognise and resonate with the idea of indirect harm being wielded as a weapon, and institutions struggling to categorise it.

The point is not that culture gets things right. It often does not. The point is that stories and mythology are a time-tested distillation of something felt by many to express a deep truth.

What this is not: stereotyping individuals

At this point, a critical distinction must be made explicit.

Stereotyping is not a diagnostic tool, and it has no place in justice. Assigning traits, intent, or risk to an individual based on gender, sexuality, or group membership is unethical, unscientific, and incompatible with due process.

This article explicitly rejects stereotyping as a tool to judge individuals.

But rejecting stereotypes does not require us to deny the existence of patterns of behaviour.

There is a fundamental difference between:

• stereotyping, which shortcuts inquiry by presuming outcomes, and
• pattern recognition, which informs inquiry by identifying what kinds of evidence may be relevant to investigate.

Pattern recognition does not answer the question what happened here. It informs the question what should we look into.

Every serious investigative system already relies on this distinction, including the policing of domestic violence, which is anchored around the recognition of established patterns of male violence toward women.

Pattern recognition is how investigation works

Fraud detection looks for recurring methods before it identifies perpetrators. Counter‑terrorism identifies radicalisation pathways before it identifies suspects. Child protection uses risk indicators without presuming guilt. Domestic‑violence triage already recognises patterned risk factors associated with escalation and lethality of male violence toward women.

In each case, patterns guide attention; evidence decides outcomes.

The same logic must apply to non‑physical forms of harm.

If certain behaviours tend to operate through reputation rather than force, through third parties rather than confrontation, then investigative tools must be capable of detecting those behaviours. Refusing to recognise patterns does not produce neutrality. It produces institutional blindness.

Why culture noticed what policy ignored

The reason cultural narratives noticed indirect aggression earlier than law is simple: institutions evolved to see bodies, not reputations.

Police frameworks, evidentiary standards, and risk tools were built around visible harm. Non‑physical coercion, reputational destruction, and systems abuse do not present as discrete incidents. They unfold over time, across institutions, and through other people.

Culture, by contrast, has always been attuned to social power. It recognises that harm can be inflicted without leaving bruises.

This does not make cultural tropes accurate or a fair reflect of the facts of every case. It makes them diagnostic signals – warnings that something important is happening that is sufficiently salient to warrant description, and investigation when the facts align with the warning signs.

What psychology has documented for decades

Social and developmental psychology has long distinguished between direct aggression (physical or overt) and indirect, relational, or social aggression.

Direct aggression is easier to see. It leaves marks. It fits comfortably within criminal categories.

Indirect aggression operates differently. It targets relationships, belonging, status, and credibility. It includes behaviours such as gossip, rumour‑spreading, social exclusion, reputational attacks, and the recruitment of third parties to do harm on one’s behalf. This is where false or unsubstantiated accusations of criminal behaviour often sit. They weaponise institutions as third parties, indirectly wielding the legitimised violence of the State. The result is reputational destruction through accusation rather than force. It is often harder to prove precisely because it is designed to be deniable.

Crucially, the empirical studies in psychology do not claim exclusivity. The literature identifies gender‑skewed tendencies, not rules.

On average:

• men are more likely to use direct, physical aggression;
• women are more likely to use indirect, relational forms of aggression.

These are overlapping distributions, not binaries. Many women never engage in indirect aggression. Many men do. Similarly, some men never engage in physical violence, though they may be victims of indirect aggression.

The point is not who is, but what patterns exist at the population level.

Domestic‑violence systems remain overwhelmingly calibrated to detect the first pattern and largely blind to the second.

In demanding that domestic-violence receive the attention it justly deserves, some DV advocacy frameworks have promoted an uncritical belief‑first posture toward allegations made by women. While motivated by concern for genuine victims, such approaches make investigation of indirect aggression structurally impossible, because any scrutiny is pre‑classified as hostile or illegitimate.

In short, indirect aggression is inherently difficult to detect because it doesn’t leave obvious physical scars, it is designed to be hidden, and it is undertaken indirectly by engaging third parties and institutions. Our current cultural zeitgeist also promotes cultural norms around gender violence that suggest it is immoral or ‘anti-women’ to even investigate the possibility of institutional manipulation through false or misleading claims, despite decades of research in psychology that indicates this is a scientifically established pattern of female aggression.

The consequence of this asymmetry is not merely theoretical. Our entire domestic-violence system is therefore designed to detect and punish male-pattern aggression, but is structurally blind to the female-pattern aggression that is identified in psychology literature. Even when the latter is criminal in nature. Even when it results in catastrophic harm.

A necessary clarification: this is not about women versus men

At this point, it is important to widen the lens.

Indirect and relational aggression is not exclusive to women. Similar patterns have been documented among gay men, particularly in contexts where physical aggression is neither socially acceptable nor strategically viable. Psychological research on gay male peer and intimate relationships identifies forms of harm such as gossip, social exclusion, reputational attacks, and outing – behaviours that target belonging and status rather than bodies.

Cultural tropes of the “mean” or “bitchy” gay man are often exaggerated and have caused real harm through stereotyping and internalised homophobia. They are not endorsed here. But their persistence reflects the same underlying truth: when power operates through social position rather than physical dominance, indirect aggression becomes salient across genders and sexual orientations.

This matters because it breaks the false frame of backlash. The issue is not men attacking women, or women attacking men. It is institutions failing to recognise certain modes of harm wherever they occur.

Why the justice system’s blind spot matters

When systems only recognise one form of aggression, they misidentify victims and perpetrators. They reward those whose harm fits the recognised template and fail those whose harm does not.

The system gets played.

Victims of covert harm are wrongly treated as perpetrators, and punished for crimes they never committed.

Non‑physical coercion, reputational destruction, and systems abuse can be devastating. They can strip people of housing, employment, parental relationships, and social standing. They can drive people into isolation, despair, and in some cases suicide.

And yet, because these harms do not look like violence as traditionally defined, they are often minimised, ignored, or misclassified.

A system that looks for only one kind of harm is blind to the patterns that harm through other mechanisms.

Naming the gap – carefully

At this point, the question becomes one of language. And I already feel like I’m walking on eggshells.

Feminist literature already uses the term toxic femininity to describe the internalisation of restrictive gender norms – passivity, self‑sacrifice, people‑pleasing – that harm women themselves. That work is important and valid.

But it does not exhaust the phenomenon of toxic traits traditionally associated with femininity.

If toxic masculinity names the harmful expressions of masculine norms – without implying that masculinity itself is toxic – then analytical symmetry requires language for the harmful expressions of feminine‑coded norms as well.

Used precisely, toxic femininity does not describe women. It describes a mode of harm: indirect, relational, socially mediated, and often institutionally amplified. It is one pattern among others. It is not universal. It is not deterministic. And it is not a license for stereotyping.

What matters is not the label itself, but what it allows us to see.

Investigate everything, presume nothing

Recognising patterned behaviour does not decide cases. It improves investigations.

Justice does not require us to believe all narratives uncritically. It requires us to investigate all allegations competently, with tools capable of detecting all forms of harm.

Culture noticed indirect aggression centuries ago. Psychology documented it decades ago. Law is only beginning to catch up with overdue and necessary Coercive Control legislation.

Police are trained to detect the signs of direct aggression, and we have risk-based assessment tools designed to assist early detection of these patterns – control, dominance, physical aggression, violence.

Our justice system needs to be trained to detect the risk indicators associated with indirect and relational aggression including persistent gossip, reputational manipulation, third‑party recruitment, social exclusion, and the use of institutions to inflict harm, such as through false or unsubstantiated criminal accusations.

Our institutions are already attuned to detect risk indicators of toxic masculinity. They have not yet developed the capacity to recognise toxic femininity – the pattern of indirect and relational harm recognised in mythology, cultural diagnostics and psychology research. The danger lies not in naming these patterns, but in continuing to pretend they do not exist.

A justice system that can only see one kind of violence will always fail those harmed by another.