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Women's Feature Service

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India - New Delhi

 

Canada: Abused South Asian Women in Canada Support Program SAFSS

By Naunidhi Kaur

Toronto (Women's Feature Service) - Harminder Dhaliwal, 35, immigrated to Canada from Chandigarh in 2006 when she got married to Baljinder Singh Dhaliwal. "I knew that it was his second marriage but he seemed like a decent guy," she says. "It was an arranged match and I knew that he drove his own taxi in Toronto and had a fully-paid off house in Brampton. I felt my future would be secure." But the illusion of security became a nightmare for Harminder when she arrived there. Her husband was abusive and would hit her over small incidences: too much or too less salt in the meal; her failure to answer the home phone when he called; and even if she asked what he considered were too many questions.

Tolerating his behaviour, Harminder tried to make her marriage work. "I questioned myself and thought maybe I was doing something wrong," she recalls. However, after her daughter was born the situation got increasingly worse. "My husband got me a one-way ticket to India three months after my daughter was born. He said he would come to get me soon. I stayed in Chandigarh for three months. He did not call me and when I did, he made excuses. Everyone back home advised me to go back and fight for my marriage," recalls Harminder, as her two-year-old daughter seated in a stroller sleeps through most of the counselling sessions that she attends at the South Asia Family Support Services (SAFSS). A Markham, Ontario-based charitable organisation, SAFSS, provides assistance to women suffering abuse. Says Harminder, "I try and come here during her nap times as I have nowhere to leave her."

 

SAFSS - http://www.safss.com/

Harminder recalls that while she was in India, her husband sold off their Brampton house to his sister-in-law for US$5. (This is a token amount for a property that could well cost $30,0000. Abusive men think that they can get away with anything - that they will divorce their wife and get away with paying anything to her.) Back in Ontario, Harminder is fighting for her right to stay in her matrimonial home with her daughter. "I am going ahead with my separation and divorce. I will not let go of my right to stay in my matrimonial home. My husband thinks he can get away with anything but I am going to give up my rights that easily," she says. Under Canadian law, after divorce the property owned by the husband is distributed equally between the spouses.

For Harminder, who has a History honors degree from Punjab University, fighting for her rights against her husband is an uphill task. Language and finances are her main worries. She uses an interpreter when attending court hearings as she finds the Canadian accent difficult to understand. "I have received a certificate from the Legal Aid. I am now going to court to fight this out." Legal Aid, an independent but publicly funded and publicly accountable non-profit corporation, helps people with low-income access legal help. It also helps people like Harminder to remain hopeful of a better future. As Harminder puts it, "Just because my marriage did not go well does not mean all is over for me in Canada. I am sponsoring my parents so that they can take care of my daughter while I work."

SAFSS gets many cases like Harminder's in which abusive husbands control the women in a marriage and then try to get out of the relationship without any financial and emotional liabilities. Zarina Sherazee, Manager, Family, Health and Volunteer Development, SAFSS, explains, "The challenge I face in counselling women from South Asia is that they are not aware of how deeply they are abused by their partners. Coming from traditional South Asian backgrounds some of my clients try to cover up the emotional abuse that they take for years." Sherazee gets phone calls as well as visits from 300 such women each year. She has been counselling for 20 years. The phone in her Markham office keeps ringing, as she shuffles between the four lines on the PBX, listening to calls of distress from women who find it hard to get help in an alien country.

Over the years Sherazee has found that clients who are angry with their situation of emotional, physical and financial abuse are the ones who try and get out of the situation sooner. "At the same time, there are many women who stay in a situation of abuse for 30 years and not say anything," she says.

More often, women don't report because of fear or because they think their culture teaches them to be resilient when faced with abuse. "Their uncles, aunts, fathers and brothers have always taught them that after marriage they have to take the good with the bad." And women continue to take the beatings as a part of the bad. "I try to teach the women to not be a victim of abuse but take responsibility for protecting themselves," says Sherazee.

Another challenge that abused women face is that even after their marriage ends, they have to deal with vindictive spouses, who loathe to see them settled down and content. Zahida Khan, 42, found that even after divorce, her husband did not want to let her lead a new, non-abusive, happy life with her children. Khan, who was divorced three years ago, says that her husband's remarriage doesn't bother her. "I don't really care about that. He is out of my life and I am very happy with the situation. However, even now he stalks me. The other day when I was going to the mosque he came and slowed down the car and started abusing me. Then he sped off." Ask her why her husband does this she explains in Punjabi, "He cannot see me happy with the children. He used to control everything... my life, what I did, my identity... when we were married. Now he sees me out and about leading a happy life and this irks him no end. I know that is the reason he cannot live in peace."

Control and power thus remain issues in abusive relationships - much after the relationship ceases to exist. This is what is common between Khan's and Dhaliwal's lives despite their differing South Asian cultures. While the men bristle with annoyance, the women resolve to move on by attending support group sessions, share their tales, food and survival tips. According to Sherazee, the combination of individual counselling and the SAFSS support group sessions, which are held every Wednesday, has helped empower abused women. Attending the sessions, the women who hail from Afghanistan, Iran, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka learn that they are not the only ones going through an abusive relationship. The close interaction, pot-luck sessions, and conversations in their mother tongues on life's simple things such as tips on skin care during the winter or information on the new courses at a community college, give the women the confidence and the knowledge that they are not alone.

"If you think of good things, good things will happen to you. Stay positive and dream of a brilliant future for yourself and it will come true," assures Sherazee to the women attending the counselling session.

(The names of abuse victims have been changed to protect their identity.)





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