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A 26-year-old mother endured six long years of abuse, neglect and fear. Like other survivors of domestic violence, she went through the cycle of pain and confusion. It took the wisdom of a boy to finally set her free.
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By Germelina A. Lacorte
davaotoday.com
DAVAO CITY — The first thing she noticed when he became her boyfriend was he did not like the way she dressed. Tall and slender, she was fond of wearing tight-fitting clothes, which he said was calling the men’s attention to her. This was often the cause of their early quarrels.
At that time, when he used to slap her, she thought it was her fault. She started wearing loose T-shirts. “It made me look like a hanger because I was very thin,” Sarah (not her real name) recalled.
But she continued to attract the men’s attention, so she continued to get the blame. “Why is it that men keep looking at you?” he would ask her. “If you want them to stop, you should pluck out their eyes,” she would retort.
Holding back her tears, Sarah, who had survived more than six years of neglect and domestic violence from her boyfriend, the father of her six year-old child, recounted the ordeals she had suffered.
The worst happened over a year ago, at her boyfriend’s house in Matan-ao, Davao del Sur, when, suddenly, he got so jealous of his best friend. He poked a gun to her head.
“He had four guns inside the room,” Sarah recalled. “He took one and pointed it to my head. I begged him to stop, for the sake of our child. I was already crying. I told him I will do everything for him. But still, he pulled the trigger.”
Warm, copious tears ran down her cheeks because she taught she was going to die. She survived — because the gun was not loaded — but with this harrowing story to tell.
Despite existing laws on domestic violence, thousands of women like Sarah are still trapped in relationships where they suffer physical and psychological abuse, according to the Bathaluman Crisis Center, which provide assistance to women victims of abuse.
Several laws protecting the rights of women against violence, like the 1997 Women Development Code of Davao City and the Republic Act 9262, otherwise known as the Anti-Violence Against Women and their Children Act of 2002, have not really stopped the abuse nor emboldened most women to file cases against their husbands. Most of them go back to them at the end of the day, unable to afford even the costs of filing fees, said Luz Ilagan, chairperson of Bathaluman. (See related story.)
In the case of Sarah, whose mother had worked for the center assisting abused women, her dreams of settling down and raising a family had prompted her to give her boyfriend a chance. “I used to envy my friends who are having their own families. So, I kept forgiving him,” she said.
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