MUSINGS:

Domestic tyranny - elusive but explosive

by Padma Edirisinghe

That phenomenon known as MEDIA exhibits the most fluctuating trends as fluctuating as the oceanic waves of the deep sea.

To illustrate the above point, there once flashed on the electronic media a programme titled 'Fingerprints'. With acute sensitivity care was taken to show it in the hours creeping to midnight when babes of the house are fast asleep for the episodes exposed were a mélange of horror and violence. Curiously, the backstage of the horrendous drama was mostly our villages and once word got around, cops often had to wade across rivers and deep canyons and thick forests to reach them. The men and women involved were often very poor specimens of humans but yet aggressive emotions sizzled in them so much that brutal acts mostly activated by illicit sex relations or issues bordering on them, came natural to them, specially to the males.

Mess

With my children fast asleep and away from the torrid mess, I used to watch this programme often, even heretical thoughts flooding my mind. A question that arose in me often was, when all this happened where were the village elders and the revered monks, custodians of virtue in our villages? This does not insinuate that I naively expect these personnel to be present on the crime scene. But at least one can expect them to be sensitive to the circumstances leading to such debacles. Then the would be perpetrators could be summoned or the elders themselves can visit them and advise them accordingly.

This topic surfaced within me when I read about the recent Pannala tragedy where a mother and daughter commit suicide. The issue rises when a suitor keeps on making advances to the daughter. But they are close relations and mother objects. Then is staged the ultimate tragedy with the extinction of two valuable human lives, both this side of 50.Why was advice beforehand not sought from the temple or police? Why did responsible neighbours act so insensitive? Were they carrying "The mind Your own Business" a bit too far?

There is an institution now known as the Women's Bureau but it is charged only with police duties and as far as I am aware does not encroach into the advisory and guidance arena. There is also the emergency number in police stations now,119 but that too limits itself to police duties and has no advisory or guidance tasks.

Misunderstood

Domestic tyranny is behind most of these crimes but domestic tyranny in itself is a concept much misunderstood. It entangles itself mostly with cruelty to domestic workers, now the salad filling with incredible tales from the middle east.

But domestic tyranny can bracket within its limit umpteen kinds of tyrannies in our Asian society, as those exerted by parents on children, those exerted by elder siblings on younger ones, by close relatives who domesticate themselves in other people's houses and lend themselves to many a domestic battle.

In laws both father in law and mother in law and sister in law and brother in law too embellish with vice and disharmony the foul dish.

It may be pertinent to quote some official statistics of crime in the blessed isle. 1,410 of criminal cases have occurred under one roof! So much for the much hyped family ties.

The writer is not carrying a tirade against the extended family system but were one into pry into the causes of many a domestic crime one can fathom how the network of these relations leads to grisly crime. IT is no cause for light talk but murder becomes easy to be perpetrated when it is done under one roof.

Courts

Tyranny can also be exerted by a husband on a wife or on a husband by a wife. Usually few go to courts on the matter and somehow go on living but the ultimate flare up ends in courts. This tyranny can extend from verbal to physical.

The writer's piece on Life after Life reveals how a husband drags his sick wife to a well at midnight and bathes her causing pneumonia and ultimate death.

Imprisoned

Subsequent to the writer's visit to the women's section of Welikade prison years back, she met many women there, imprisoned for exerting tyranny on their husbands .Talk of the need to save women from their hubbies! The tyranny had gone beyond verbal tyranny to physical tyranny. The only woman who admitted to murder was the one who had killed her husband by poisoning his food. The provocation was this. The woman was extremely beautiful and so the husband took care that no male approached her when he went out to work, so he locked her up till he returned. And she in turn took her revenge.

That is what I conclude, domestic tyranny is very easy for it takes place under one roof. So novel ways and means have to be explored to combat this growing menace. First and foremost networking a team comprising such members as a police personnel, religious leaders of the village, newspaper reporters, social service officers, writers and even education officers can act as a sure guarantee to combat the scourge of domestic tyranny which in turn would plummet the island's rising crime rate.