Gender Violence And Money #16days
A 2007 ad on the issue from Sri Lanka’s cricketing conscience, Kumar Sangakkara.
Humans are sexual dimorphic. Men are bigger than women. Animals are thought to evolve this way to compete over mates (ie, male on male, or male on prey violence), not to beat their mates directly. Still, we live in a time where the Maldives still publicly flogs women for adultery and Sri Lankans often look the other way at domestic abuse.
I won’t get into why spousal abuse (in any direction) is bad. As your mother told you, don’t hit. The more interesting question is why do so many women stay in abusive marriages for so long, and why do families encourage them to? This is what’s behind the complex nexus of abuse that makes it about more than bad people. To quote Method Man, cash rules everything around me.
This is a long essay from Tiger Beatdown about class, but the part about domestic violence is quite telling:
Over the next three years, the violence escalated, lulled, escalated again. Until my brother was born, and a priest finally intervened. Told my mother, finally, that she was going to die, and her children were going to die, unless she left…
She ran away from home. Which many women have to do. Unlike many women who have to do it, she had the college degree, had the infrastructure of family; we lived in other people’s houses, we lived in bad apartments, we slept on furniture people would otherwise have thrown away, I remember more than anything else from these years my mother suddenly starting to cry when I wanted a sandwich and she had to tell me there was no peanut butter, we’d used up our peanut butter and couldn’t get more. But we ate, we had apartments, we had furniture. Other women who have to run away do not have these luxuries. Which does a lot to explain why many of them never run away at all.
This is something we don’t speak about enough; the role of economic stress in domestic violence, or the role that cash, pure cash, plays in keeping women vulnerable. It’s a knotty subject; some abusers undermine their partner’s financial security, take exclusive possession of the bank accounts or spend all the money or demand that their partners work less often or stop working altogether, and so the women cannot leave because they have become unemployable or simply don’t have access to the cash they’d need to escape. And sometimes, women don’t leave because there is not and never has been enough money. Nobody should have to choose between the violence of extreme poverty and the violence of an abusive relationship. But it remains a choice between violence and violence. Class is not separable from the discussion. Because gender and class have never been separable at all. (Tiger Beatdown)
Why don’t women leave? Why don’t families encourage them to? Think about it. If you’re a woman in Sri Lanka you probably could leave and go back to your parents, return to your role as a child. If you have a child, however, it’s not so easy. Children require money and time. Making money requires time, it’s a Catch 22. If you don’t have family support (or your family doesn’t have resources), you’re screwed. You have to stay. If your husband is a special psycho and actively cuts you off from money or opportunity, you’re really really messed.
The police don’t help, counsellors often don’t help and even family fails. The default response is to stay and make it work. For the kid. I know a few families where the fathers are abusive until the son grows old enough to assault them, Sinha Bahu style. It’s not a healthy position for anyone.
I think the best thing to fight domestic violence would be decent halfway houses for women and children, and childcare. So women could get away from bad husbands and bad families without having to scrabble for food, or worry about their children’s safety.
In the end the way women can fight violence is not directly, but through institutions, or the state’s monopoly of violence. That is, the state or police need to defend women (and people) in general such that the strong do not terrorize the weak. Such that strength is defined as education and reason and other attributes more conducive to the survival of the species. Sri Lanka has about 1 million more women than men, but they’re under-represented in positions of power. That has to change gradually, but till, then abused women could really use a place to crash.
This is part of the #16days campaign. They’ve invited people to blog or speak online about gender violence issues. Jerry’s done a post as well.
Not to quote Ice Cube, but the Sri Lankan police are hardly beloved. A 
I just gave a talk at the University Of Sri Jayawardenapura along with Reeza Zarook of Anything.lk and Rohan Jayaweera of Google. These are my notes: Devin Jayasundara asked me for a subject for this talk and I told him Internet property. But I talked to my fiancé Shru and she had a better idea. Startups aren’t about creating property at all, not really. They’re about creating territory, about creating land.
I haven’t been blogging much, I know. It’s partly because we’ve been doing a lot of work on YAMU, especially shipping 1.0.1 of the Android app today. It’s on the 
I met an old-timer who said they used to drop acid and sleep atop Sigiriya, but the place has taken on a more commercial and quasi-spiritual role now. It was built by a king as a sort of retreat and used as a monastery. Now it’s a prime tourist and cultural destination. Hence it’s a bit odd to see a Japanese beer commercial shot up there. There’s a bunch of people eating, um, deep fried cream filled coconuts and then drinking some bracing beer. I hear the whole thing cost Rs. 25,000 (I’m presuming they used stock images).
Indi, good article ! Thanks.
Yes , the women seems to get the shorter end of the stick everywhere
” 1 [Tamil women] A voiceless majority .In Sri Lanka, large numbers of mostly-Tamil minority women in the North and East are bearing the brunt of the post-conflict period. Displaced, widowed, injured and traumatized, many are primary carers for other maimed and traumatized persons in environments where resources are scarce and security concerns are extremely high. The military has replaced most civil administrative systems in the North and East, and reports on the increase of sexual assault throughout high-security zones are also citing a rise in prostitution, trafficking and STDs, since vulnerable minority women must now deal with male Sinhalese soldiers as part of their daily routines.2 Compounding their disadvantage is an administration perceived as having little interest in addressing legitimate minority grievances, sex equality or crimes against women, and which has presided over a widening gender gap.3 And added to this is the disabling effect of often stricter Tamil traditions and stigmas, which tightened during the war. ”
http://www.opendemocracy.net/jo-baker/seen-and-not-heard-women-in-sri-lankas-reconciliation-commission
male sinhala soldiers? uh huh.
Great article, Indi. It’s something about which I feel very passionate.
I attended a workshop on tackling domestic violence a few years ago and there was one seminar in particular which stuck with me. The first thought is usually why does the woman stay with an abusive husband, especially if she has kids? However, if one weighs up the positives and negatives of leaving, most of the reasons to go are of long-term benefit and cause immense short term difficulties.
Can the woman leave, or is she being watched by the partner or his accomplices? Where does the woman go? How can she travel, does she have enough money to survive for even the first few days? If she has kids, how will she shelter and feed them? What about their education? Will the husband go looking for her and cause her more harm? Will the police take her seriously, let alone protect her? How will she survive economically? Will she be shunned by her community, her family and friends? She stands to lose everything but her personal dignity and physical well being, though there’s no guarantee that she’ll be ok mentally or physically with limited support available. How will she live? Will her actions cause problems for her kids, will they ever see friends and family again? Will her kids resent her and want to go back to the abusive father? Clearly, for most victims it’s more terrifying to escape than to stay and take the abuse.
The solution has to be a top-down approach from government to say this will no longer be tolerated. There must be a high profile and long-running advertisement campaign by the government to highlight that the problem exists, that it’s totally unacceptable and that stern punishment will be applied to abusers. It has to be something that people are not afraid to talk about, to reduce the shame and bring the issues into the open so they can be addressed head on.
Yes, there needs to be a network of safehouses for women who have to flee quickly, with facilities to take care of the needs of their kids. However, this is no medium to long term solution and immediately enfranchises her disadvantage while allowing the abuser to live in the family home and go on with life as usual. Much better would also be a period when the alleged abuser is not allowed near the family home following an allegation of domestic violence. Why should the victim be forced to leave? This allows the victim to recover from injuries, provide evidence of abuse, weigh up the options and to explain the circumstances to family and friends without being labelled as the outsider/troublemaker from the start. It should also be possible for the police to press charges when there’s good evidence and the victim is too scared to press charges. There should be a temporary welfare payment to victims of domestic abuse where the partner is charged, continued for longer if he’s convicted, so that the victim is not dissuaded from complaining on the fear of destitution.
There’s so much that can be done, but first of all it starts with leadership from the top: domestic abuse is real, it’s unacceptable, victims will be supported and and abusers will face strict penalties.
[...] who blogs at indi.ca has joined the 16days online campaign with a blog post. Original post at http://indi.ca/2011/11/gender-violence-and-money-16days/ Indi tweets at http://twitter.com/indica and you can follow him on facebook [...]