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When I was a nine-year-old in Mumbai, we were one of two South Indian families in our sprawling apartment block. The family upstairs had two grown sons and a 20-year-old daughter. She was quite the belle of the neighbourhood and chose a handsome Sardar classmate as her future husband. When her family protested, the couple eloped and his family, which was ready to welcome her, arranged a wedding for them. This enraged the brothers, who stormed the couple’s home and beat their sister. It became an ugly police case, leading to heartbreak and years of separation between the families until they reconciled over cute grandkids.
You would be forgiven for thinking this was clearly ‘sixties India’ and modern India is different. But last year, actor-politician Shatrughan Sinha’s popular actress daughter Sonakshi married her boyfriend Zaheer and everybody talked as much about the lovely wedding as about the fact that the bride’s two brothers refused to attend this inter-community union even though, at 36, the intelligent and outspoken bride was well over the age of consent.
Taking away women’s right to independent action and consent is the mutant seed from which springs the gnarled tree of domestic abuse. When we negate a woman’s right to think, speak and act on her own, the next step is to deny that she can feel pain and trauma. We see this in the example of the Bahraini woman who suffered a horrific acid attack that has left her disabled, scarred and with physical and psychological trauma for life.
Bahrain was one of the first GCC countries to acknowledge the shameful underbelly of domestic violence in the early 2000s. The Aisha Yateem Family Counselling Centre officially opened in 2007 (but was offering informal support a bit before that) and today we have the LMRA-run Expat Protection Centre – because often, domestic abuse covers not just the violence between husband and wife and children but also violence against domestic workers. While Public Prosecution statistics show that Bahrain domestic violence reports dropped by seven per cent in 2023, protection orders in domestic violence cases rose for the corresponding time from seven in 2020 to eight in 2023, totalling 18 orders issued between 2020 and 2023. This is not entirely bad news because it shows awareness and a willingness to report cases and seek redressal.
That is why it is shocking to hear about the ongoing Bahrain acid case, although migrant rights workers say equally painful and traumatic attacks such as being hurt with boiling water or oil have been reported.
In many Asian countries and even in the West where there is a sizeable Asian diaspora, similar ugly crimes have been reported and in 95pc of the cases, it involves the Asian diaspora and women are the victims. Let this be one social misdemeanour that we all join to stamp out and not just tolerate as a cultural aberration.
meeraresponse@gmail.com
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