Due to inferiority complex males are taking advantage of male dominance euphoria to domestically abuse mental stability of our unsung heroes.
Let me share with you a tale of atrocity, horror and heroism. It’s sad to mention the fact that our country Pakistan is a male dominant country with 48.76% of women according to the 2017 census report. This male dominance is embedded in the deep roots of our civilization due to various reasons among them some prominent ones are culture, religion and ignorance. The point here is not to mention the causes and reasons of male dominance but the forms it can take.
The following few mentioned incidents are real life stories, I myself is the witness of. Two years back we had a house help named Rukhsana. She had three sons and a daughter who was about eleven years old. All the sons were boarded into a Christian missionary boarding school and she along with her eleven year old husband used to live with us in the servant quarter. She was a very hardworking woman with amazing skills and abilities. She was like our family member. The only misfortune of her was that she was married to the beast. She used to earn more than her husband and would support the education of her kids. In no time, she managed to get an increase in her salary and was even able to support other family members and even fulfil the wishes of her husband. She also paid off all the debt of her husband but that selfish man was never considerate or even happy.
One day my family and I heard loud noises of yelling, shouting, beating and crying from the servant quarters. It was this beast kicking and beating his wife because she hid 5000 rupees from her salary from him to send them to her sons to buy new shoes. The noise was so loud that the entire street could hear it, it was for the first time that my father couldn’t resist and decided to intervene because it continued for about 20 minutes. But the most heartbreaking thing was my own mother stopped him from interfering because that beast could have made any shameless story and blamed my father to save his reputation. So everyone waited there, doing nothing, hearing shrieks and cries but helpless.
Similarly, another house help named Jabeen had two sons and a daughter. She was forced to bring another child into this world when she never wanted it because it was already hard to provide life necessities to the children she already had. Her husband was the most irritating and irresponsible of all. He used to do nothing and sit at home looking after the children. He wanted to start big with zero education. He was not willing to work as a gardener, nor a laborer. He was then forced to start working as a waiter in a restaurant and guess what he was troubled because he had to clean the dirty tables and plates after customers. Then Jabeen somehow convinced the restaurant owner to make him stand in front of clay oven to cook Tortillas and Naan as it was a clean job and guess what this time, her husband fought with the restaurant owner that it was hot in front of oven and he cannot put 200 Naan daily, his shoulders hurt. With this he was kicked out of the restaurant. Six months pregnant Jabeen had to mop the floor and do all the chores to make both ends meet while her husband sleeps under the fan.
These are just the two stories I narrated to her, there are several more. There are several women who despite financial independence are the victims of mental and physical domestic abuse. They grind themselves in the millstone. They never get a minute of peace or rest. They are never appreciated or encouraged. Their male counterparts are incapable of making ends meet and get out their frustration in these heroines. They consider them a threat to their manliness. Most of these women die getting mentally unstable because of life long sheer pressure. They live a lonely life and no one to share their pains and in most cases they are advised to get comfortable with this attitude as every woman goes through this. She must save her marriage on the cost of her life as she has no place to go other than her husband’s house.
I want to eradicate this feeling of loneliness and helplessness. How mentally devastating it is to let someone know that you are worthless and nothing without being associated or defined by someone else. So, I plan to open a WOMEN COMMUNITY CENTER in my area where every evening these women can visit and have a cup of tea and chat with each other, share their pains and learn something even if its sewing or religious knowledge or just random gossips so that they can get a sigh of relief even if its temporary. I want to further extend this mission to make a small housing colony of divorced women and girls where they can live together, open small shops to financially help one another and live their lives without being judged by a divorce stamp and understand one another. Being divorced is not a bad thing, life of a human is worth more than a marriage. When there can be a doctor’s colony, lawyer’s colony, police foundation, why not a divorcee colony so that they can live alone and respectably.
In order to bring this problem to light I started with investigating and interviewing my current house help who shared similar experiences about her and people around her. Then I tried to contact Rukhsana to see if she is doing well and heard shocking news that she can never walk again because of domestic abuse. I tried calling her but his husband snatched the phone from her and threatened us to never call again with a few big curse words. So she is definitely not doing well.
This entire process made me think about how much more I need to do in life. I have a purpose to live and to help these people through legal means is one of them. People no longer trust Aman gahs and NGOs because of corruption and less government authority. One of my aims of doing CSS was to provide these women with support and a back. All those moments when I have seen women being humiliated despite giving their best is all those moments I broke a piece of my heart. All those moments of atrocities and cruelty are flashing back in my mind, I am obliged to do something to help our heroines to stand up for themselves.