People: Kumudu

My mother has a new helper who comes and helps us with housekeeping and making tofu. With me moving to the city to do a job and being occupied on weekends with my Master's research project, I can no longer help with housekeeping and guest welcoming activities at our Bed & Breakfast. The lady who used to help my mother earlier with making tofu no longer needed this second part time job since her elder son is now able to support her and her younger son.

The new helper is a lady in the village called Kumudu. On first impressions, she's very obese, moves slowly, is very chatty and has a hoarse but kind voice. She has a strong air of negativity around her, always speaking of her poverty, loans she has to pay off, family problems, health problems and a myriad of other problems. She also makes bad decisions in life, mostly by trusting people too much. She worked in Singapore as a domestic helper for several years, but she used up all her savings for various family issues. The last house she worked in didn't pay her several months of salary but Kumudu left the country and never followed up/ didn't know how to follow up. She also send an agent money for a life insurance for 3 years while she was abroad, but it seems this agent is now on the run and Kumudu does not have her money. Wherever she goes, she is very prone to exploitation because of her poverty, non-assertiveness, ignorance and tendency to trust people.

This is her story, as we've gathered over time.

When she was 16 years old and going to school, she was stalked and hounded by a boy in the village not much older than she was. He was a boy with a bad reputation and bad temper. He persisted in trying to gain her attention and even insisted to her mother on wanting to marrying her. Kumudu remembers being scared but for her, an alternate universe where she had choice in making decisions about her life did not exist. Even though the mother tried to stop it, the boy's mother had begged Kumudu's mother to let him have Kumudu and that she'll protect Kumudu because he had been torturing his own mother about it. Eventually, Kumudu's mother, for lack of better options in their poverty-striken lives, gave Kumudu away to go live with him.

The legal marriageable age in Sri Lanka according to the law (this excludes Muslims, who are subject to the Muslim Law which has no minimum age for marriage) is 18 years.

For the first few weeks of Kumudu moving into the boy's house, the boy's mother had protected Kumudu and slept with her. Eventually, the boy grew impatient and demanded that Kumudu sleep with him. We can safely assume that on the first day, a frightened 16 year old girl was raped while having no clue about sexual intercourse. Again, for her, an alternate universe where she had equal rights to gain pleasure from sexual intimacy never existed/ exists.

Stories like these are common in families of this socioeconomic status. Life does go on, and Kumudu went on to have four children. Her four children are married and now Kumudu has a total of twelve grandchildren, all of whom she adores. Her husband is engaged in many vices; drinking, smoking, taking drugs, gambling, extra-marital affairs and domestic violence. There's hardly been a day of joy or relief in Kumudu's life. Despite many health issues, she now works 4 part time odd jobs cleaning houses, pasting envelopes, making paper bags and selling tea leaves to make ends meet because her husband fails to contribute. In the past she's worked overseas and even worked in a quarry breaking up stones to be able to send her children to school. She also contributes most of her earnings for her grandchildren's well-being (education and food) because some of their parents are unable to make ends meet. Kumudu is therefore in a state of constant debt and poverty.

Kumudu has one son who's taken after his father. He drives a tuk tuk for his daytime job, he also uses drugs and gambles. Although he has a good wife (who gets along with Kumudu so well, which is not very common in a mother-in law and daughter-in-law relationship) and four children, he comes home drunk a lot, loses his temper and beats the living daylights off his wife. His children watch. Some days Kumudu says she can't sleep when her son or husband is late to come home because she's afraid of what is going to happen when the men arrive. She mostly fears not for herself, but for her daughter-in-law.

I once met her daughter-in-law. She's a pretty thing with a big smile and four children. No one would think that behind that smile lies so much misery.

When we need to contact Kumudu, we have to call her son to arrange it. Kumudu and her daughter-in-law do not own mobile phones. Their husbands have forbidden it, out of fear that their wives will call other men or have extra-marital affairs. Kumudu's daughter-in-law is forbidden to leave the house except for certain trips that her husband approves. She helps her mother-in-law with pasting envelopes and making paper bags from home. Kumudu is allowed to go work but she has a curfew. If she is not home be a certain time, she has to explain herself or get beaten.

Up until recently, Kumudu worked in another house for several days in the week. The woman there was nasty. Kumudu was expected to handwash the whole family's clothes, help with cooking, feed and look after a heavy toddler, and clean the house for a full day's salary of 600 rupees (USD 4). Often, she was too sick from joint and back pains to go to work the next day. Kumudu had once, as a desperate measure, taken a personal loan of 6000 rupees (40 USD) from the woman of this house. In an attempt to keep Kumudu bound to the job for a very long time, the woman refused to deduct more that Rs 100 (USD 0.70) from the loan amount for each day worked. She's still trying to pay it off.

Some of Kumudu's grandchildren have various problems in school. They have been associated with drugs, cigarettes, stealing, fights, boys bullying girls and girls seeking the attention of boys. My mother asked Kumudu to send the older kids for a discussion session once a week. I've observed my mother trying to get close to them by talking to them about good behaviour and doing fun activities like making various types of food. They like coming over to our house. She insists that these children can be saved from leading dysfunctional lives like their parents with proper intervention.

Kumudu also believes that the only chance for her grandchildren to escape poverty is to study well. That's why she spends nearly all her savings on them. She's unaware that these grandchildren most likely will also carry forward destructive habits and behaviours they have observed from their parents and grandparents. The boys will adopt misogynistic attitudes in this patriarchal society. The girls will accept their submissive female roles in society and ignorantly bring up their sons to feel superior.

It appears to be vicious cycle.

I've asked my mother if anything can be done to help these women get out of this cycle of abuse. We could call the police, we discussed, but our anonymity may not be maintained. Worst case, Kumudu and her grandchildren maybe forbidden to visit our house. We could talk to our village in-charge (Grama Niladhari) and see if anything can be done. She's a lady so maybe she will have the compassion to get involved and try to solve this problem. There's also the chairman of the village welfare society, who we plan to get advice from. He's a man. If he doesn't believe that husbands have a right to beat and discipline their wives once in a while, he may be willing to help.

Domestic violence is surprisingly too common here. It is widely believed that domestic disputes should be settled at home and wife beating is ‘part and parcel of married life’. In fact, a local saying suggests that "there are three things you can beat: the dog, the drum and the woman". A new report released in October 2017 estimates that 60 per cent of women in Sri Lanka will experience domestic abuse at some point in their lifetimes. For some, the violence appears bound to the country’s increasing levels of male alcoholism. Drinking-related issues are more than twice as common in Sri Lanka than across the rest of South Asia. For others, it’s linked to drugs (recent countrywide figures suggest there are over 45,000 regular users of heroin).

For some women, this is a normal part of married life

In 2005, Sri Lanka enacted the Prevention of Domestic Violence Act (PDVA) No 34 of 2005. However, it is not 100% effective in protecting victims of domestic violence. Even though the penal code classifies violence as a criminal act, the PDVA does not criminalise the beating of one’s spouse. It only protects the victim by way of a Protection Order which is only valid for one year, after which the victim is made vulnerable once again. If the protection order is violated by the abuser, the court may order a fine not exceeding 10,000 rupees (USD 65) or sentence imprisonment not exceeding one year. The support systems for women are weak or non-existent. There are no mechanisms in place to provide the victim with medical care, economic support until they are able to support themselves and assistance in caring for their children or ensuring that the children are not abducted after school by the abusive husband. Marital rape is also not considered ‘rape’ in Sri Lanka's penal code. 

Given all these facts, most women choose to stay in abusive relationships without seeking help from the law. They keep running back to their abusers because of codependency issues and/or fear of social stigma. The power imbalance in these relationships is so great and added with sustained emotional abuse over time, these women are convinced there is no way out.  If there are children involved, they see no future where they can survive without a husband/ father figure in this society. After a while, even neighbours, relatives and friends become immune to known cases of repeated domestic violence. At times, the best advice they can offer is to "try to work things out with your husband". At other times, well-wishers realise that the victim does not want to attempt to break free from the abuser so they give up any efforts to help. In reality, breaking free is not as easy as it sounds.

So what can a victim really do?

Abusers have emotional control over their victims. It is unlikely that a victim's first thought is to get help from the Police. The authorities can't put the abusers away for a long period of time. Existing laws don't enable the authorities to do that.

Will the authorities be able to guarantee these women long term protection? Assuming the abusers are locked up for one incident, what happens when they return from imprisonment? Are they not going to hurt their wives even more as revenge? Perhaps in a fit of rage, they can even attempt to kill these women. Do the authorities do regular follow up checks to ensure the abusers are not repeating the abuse?

Can any form of reformative training change the abusive habit patterns of these men? No one knows. Even if it was successful, it's not implemented here.

For the moment, it appears that victims of domestic violence in Sri Lanka have not much choice but to embrace their ill fate.

Kumudu's spirit of survival, in the harsh circumstances that life has given her, is noteworthy.