What Do You Think?

[Arianna_Ludlam]

Unfortunately it is not just Bangladesh that this applies.

There are abusive relationships in all countries and all walks of life.

While hopefully this will be a wakeup call for the people of Bangladesh it should also be a reminder to everyone else that this type of abuse happens in every country even the one you are in right now.

You have a choice you can turn a blind eye and pretend you hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil or you can try to help the ever so many women and (believe it or not) men that are abused by their partner somewhere on the planet every few minutes.



copied from:
http://priyo.com/blog/asifsaleh/2011/06/16/28948.html


Whose face are we saving?

Thu, 16/06/2011


The year was 1983. I was 9. In those days, colour TV was a rare commodity in Dhaka. We didn’t have it. But our neighbours next door, a middle-aged couple with a young girl, did.

Luckily when we were at the roof, right by the water tank, we could hide and still get a direct view of the room where they had their brand new Sony colour TV. Once in a while, we would go and hide next to that tank to watch the ‘coloured’ ‘Incredible Hulk’. Who needs to listen to the dialogue when you can see the characters in colour? We were peeping toms watching our favourite monster go green in anger.

One night, however, the TV was not on air. Instead, we were introduced to a different monster – a live one, and it was none other than the man of the house. The husband was beating the wife while their 7-year-old daughter was begging mercy for her mother. I had never seen anything like that before. There was swearing followed by slaps, kicks followed by more swearing, slaps and kicks and it went on and on.

“Abbu, ar na, abbu, please ar na” – I still can hear the girl screaming at the top of her voice trying to save her mother, a respected teacher at Eden College.

Since the incident, I never tried to watch the green monster on their TV; I’ve seen that in real life. But a few days later, I saw the couple again. The husband was sipping tea and the wife reading a newspaper. Life went on as if nothing had happened.

Shhhhh… The culture of silence continues. Mum’s the word.

10 years later, I went abroad for higher studies. I took a job at the International Student Office at the university I was studying. I was the first point of contact for all the international students and so I knew the small group of Bangladeshi students there. We used to hang out as well. One of the most crowd-pulling members of that group, a PhD student, had just gotten married. He married his long time girlfriend. There was celebration, bodhuboron amid much laughter and fanfare.

Then, after a while, there was that phone call in my office:

“Asif, I don’t know if you can do something about this but he is very abusive. He kicked her out of the house and had her shiver in cold for hours.” One of the local bhabis was calling for help on behalf of the newly-wed girl, without her permission. “He beats her because he cannot control his anger,” she added.

Bewildered I asked, “But I thought this was a love marriage and they were together after a long separation”.

“He just has a strong temper” – was the rationalisation.

So I secretly sent her a note about the possible help she can get should she decides to leave him. But she didn’t. A few weeks later they both came to a party. We acted as if nothing had happened. She was putting on a smile of a lovely wife while he was cracking jokes and lecturing on how Bangladesh could be saved.

Life went on for the immigrant NRBs.

Shhhhh…The culture of silence goes on. Mum’s the word.

17 years later in 2010, I have moved back to Dhaka. A friend working at a very prestigious institute calls up.

“I have been trying to reach you for some time. You cannot tell anyone about this but you need to help me. I was living with a monster for 10 years. I was beaten unconscious once.”

How long did it continue, I asked?

“It started after a couple of years of marriage.”

“You are a highly educated, economically independent woman. Why did you stay with him for such a long time?”

“I thought it was going to be okay. He would apologise after every incident and everything would be fine for a couple of months and then it would start again. Finally, I had the courage to leave him. Now he wouldn’t leave me alone. But please don’t tell anyone. This is not very pleasant.”

Shhhhh… Still the culture of silence continues. Mum’s the word.

I don’t know the epilogue to the first two incidents I mentioned as I am not in touch with them. But I bet it is not much different from the third incident where the woman painfully woke up to the reality that once an abuser, always an abuser.

It has been 30 years since I saw the Eden College teacher get beaten black and blue by her husband in front of her daughter. A lot has changed. Colour TV is now available even at slums.

And yet, on some important matters, how little has changed!

The optimist in me would get excited in the statistics that 80 percent of the divorces in Dhaka last year were initiated by women — signalling that at least some women are realising that enough is enough. But I know I will be a fool to think that they are the majority. If Rumana Monzur too had shown the courage a little earlier, probably — just probably — her eyes would not have been ruptured to the point of going blind.

Hers was an extreme case, perhaps, and the ‘shobhbhyo shomaj’, as one newspaper called it, has been stunned by the sheer brutality of the crime. But this very ‘shobhbhyo shomaj’ would regularly pressurise the woman to ‘compromise’ (maniye cholo) in the other not so brutal (to-be-more-brutal) cases.

It took a monster to bite the nose off his wife to wake us up to the reality that we have a very serious problem in our society. But in all likelihood this culture of silence and ‘maniye chola’ will continue — sometimes for the children, sometimes for the society.

But how long? How long will it take us to realise that staying in an abusive relationship is more harmful to the children than not staying in it? How many slaps will it take before we realise that we have a problem here that will not go away unless we take an initiative?

Yes, I am talking to you — you, the parents of the abused daughter, who think that looking the other way would make the problem go away. I am talking to you, the patient wives, who think these ‘little incidents’ of the ‘hot tempered’ husbands must be ignored for the sake of a peaceful coexistence.

All you people — take a cold, hard look at the battered and brutalised face of Rumana Monzur and ask yourselves — whose face are you saving?

Shhhh….don’t answer. Mum’s the word.

[Arianna_Ludlam]

this is the story that the above is referring to.


copied from:
http://www.canada.com/news/used+independent+beaten+blinded+woman+sobs/4997332/story.html



'I used to be so independent,' beaten, blinded woman sobs



By George McLeod and Amy Chung
Postmedia News
June 24, 2011




DHAKA, Bangladesh — Rumana Manzur said she was quietly working on her University of British Columbia thesis, with her five-year-old daughter by her side, when her husband Hassan Sayed burst into the room and unprovoked, unleashed a vicious beating.


He grabbed her by the neck, threw her to the floor and gouged out her eyes.


The June 5 attack left her blind and battered.


Manzur, who spoke to a Vancouver Sun correspondent from her hospital bed in Dhaka, Bangladesh, said she now fears for her and her daughter's life.


With her tiny daughter clambering around the hospital room, she sobbed and trembled as she recalled her husband's words.


"He told me, 'I will kill you if you try to leave the country.' That was the last thing I remember him saying to me. I don't know what to do."


Overcome with emotion, tears streamed from her swollen, sightless eyes. "I am in a terrible condition."


Several days passed before her husband was arrested for the attack. Although he confessed to resenting her pursuit of education, he later changed his story and claimed at a news conference that Manzur had been communicating via Facebook with an Iranian lover, and had instigated a physical attack on him when he confronted her.


The story has unleashed a Jerry Springer-like circus in the Bangladeshi media, where her husband's accusations of infidelity are getting more ink than calls for justice.


Manzur, adamant that the accusations of infidelity are not true, sobbed quietly in her hospital bed.


"I was working on my university thesis when my husband rushed into the room and locked the door. He grabbed me by the neck and pulled my hair back. The attack was pre-planned, we were not having a fight," she said. "He put his fingers in my eyes."


The next thing Manzur recalls was waking up in a pool of blood at the hospital's ICU unit.


Manzur and her family fear that fear that Sayed, who is related to a powerful local prosecutor — could use political contacts to gain freedom.


Her father Monzur Hussain said he is "hoping and praying" that Sayed gets the harshest punishment available.


"Even when he is punished, we will not get everything back, she has lost her vision forever," he said.


Hussain said he was "shattered" to hear about the 25-minute attack on his daughter.


"It was devastating," wept the 65-year-old army veteran.


The family just returned from Pondicherry, India, defeated when doctors reiterated their worst fears that she will never see again.


The damage done to her retina and optic nerve are so severe, nothing can be repaired. They have sent Manzur's medical report in North America in hopes for a miracle.


Hussain described Sayed as a jobless and anti-social man who has been supported by his daughter and his family since they married in 2000.


"We only found out a few days ago that he didn't complete his engineering degree, all this time, we thought he finished," said Hussain. "All he did was sit in my home, play on computer."


The couple had been living with Hussain for the past five years.


Hussain said he's not entirely sure why Sayed attacked his daughter, but he thinks it had to do with her academic ambitions, living abroad or his "sheer jealousy and inferiority complex."


Although Bangladesh is a secular democracy with strong laws against domestic abuse laws that were enacted in 2010, corruption and an ineffective judicial system allow well-connected criminals to escape punishment.


Transparency International rates Bangladesh a five out of six (six being the worst) for accountability and corruption in the public sector.


Domestic abuse is often "actively tolerated" by the country's police and public, said Sara Hossain, who heads the Bangladesh Legal Aid Services Trust. "The laws are here, but the enforcement is not there. There are lots of cases where violent domestic abuse and attempted murderers go free.


"This is an exceptionally violent case and it's really a test for our judicial system."


A 2004 Immigration Canada report stated that Bangladesh ranks fourth globally in terms of violence against women, quoting a UN report.


Manzur, who is also an assistant professor at Dhaka University, said that she saw no clues to Hassan's violent instability before their marriage in August 2000.


"He was very nice and he didn't have a bad temper. We used to talk all the time . . . it wasn't an arranged marriage."


But things quickly deteriorated after they exchanged vows. "He beat me for the first time a few weeks after we were married. It was for some silly reason — he said I was ignoring him or something like that."


But even as the violence escalated, Manzur stayed with her husband.


"He was always sorry after. He always promised the beatings would never happen again."


She kept the violence a secret from her family and friends — a decision she says was the worst she ever made.


When Manzur was awarded a prestigious scholarship to pursue graduate studies in Canada, Sayed was furious.


"He was so angry when I told him I wanted to enrol in a Canadian university. He hated the idea that I would become educated."


Sayed had dropped out of engineering school in Dhaka and was surviving by speculating on the local stock market.


Manzur said she faces massive medical bills and travel expense bills for treatment to try to restore her eyesight.


Although her family rushed her to a top eye hospital in India, surgeons said there was no hope of saving her sight.


Now Manzur is desperate to return to Canada with her family to seek further medical treatment and finish her studies.


"I fear for my daughter . . . I can't even walk properly any more — I am a cripple," she said, weeping. "I used to be so independent."


What keeps her going right now is her family and the support from friends and strangers in Canada. "It means so much, the president of UBC, St. John's College, they have helped so much, even though I have nothing to give back."


Catherine Duvergne, senior adviser to UBC president Stephen Toope, said, "It's absolutely possible for Manzur to continue her studies once she has recovered."


Manzur has not given up hope that something can be done to restore her sight.


Duvergne said "Certainly the university would use all its resources to help her make contact with any medical professionals she might need."


One thing that is certain, said Duvergne, "whatever decisions Manzur makes from this point going forward she is going to need financial support. We are working on setting up an online donation site for her at www.ubc.ca."


Manzur's father said she continues to have ambitions.


"She wants to get her PhD and become a professor," he said, adding how his daughter plans to return to Vancouver immediately to complete her thesis in order to graduate in October.


"She cannot live her life alone. She needs to be looked after all the time, I'm not sure how this will happen," he said with concern.


But Hussain said he can fight on because of the amount of support he's received from all over the world.


"Pray for us that a miracle happens and she gets her sight back," he pleas.