Last night, on the way to my Bollywood dance class (!), there was a woman crying in the middle of the street. She was drunk, she was cold, and she was extraordinarily skinny.
When I sat next to her, she was murmuring that she had been brought up to be strong. She has been suffering ten years of domestic violence, her kids aren't with her, and she feels a failure. She's survived heroin addiction, but still can't seem to make life work for her. She wants to have girl friends that she can talk to and confide in, but I suspect she makes it hard work, having been hurt, she's inevitably suspicious.
She said she'd been turned away from women's shelters, they were all full. In the end the police came, her (abusive?) partner came, and she went off with him. She'd told me that she was worried that if she stayed with him, she wouldn't last two months. But she was more scared of the police than she was of him.
What can be done? I do think society has a responsibility, but how can it be fulfilled? Certainly not the way it was handled last night - the cops know her, know she's trouble and are just waiting for her to mess up once more.
There seems to be no support for these women, hardly any community support, no structures, nowhere for them to stay, nowhere they can go. It's a terrible indictment on this society - and I wonder how well we'd fare by comparison in Malaysia....
No comments:
Post a Comment