Domestic Violence

Years ago, while I was still living in the city, I picked up a woman from the middle of the road who was running away from her husband, blood streaming down her face. It must have been a late winter afternoon, because night fell during that hour. She was weaving through rush hour traffic around the corner from my home, and I was bringing children home from some extracurricular activity. I couldn't involve them in the situation, so I quickly dropped them off at home, and turned around to go out and remove her from her danger.

As I turned the corner back onto the main drag, she was planted waveringly in the middle of the road, cars zooming past her. She was crying and gesturing. A couple of blocks further down, her enormous husband was lumbering up the road, fairly slowly because he was fat and the hill was steep, swinging the plank he had probably already hit her with. I had to gauge my own level of danger here. A car is a superior weapon to a plank, he was unlikely to be able to catch up with me if I stopped for 10 seconds to load his wife into my car, nor would he likely be able to take a swing at me as as I whizzed past, woman onboard, headed for the nearest police station.

Also running through my head was the amazement that, in the 4 or 5 minutes it had taken me to drop off the children and turn my car around in our cul-de-sac, not one other motorist had stopped to help this woman, even though the theatre of an impending bloodbath was unfolding for all to see. So, there was I, a woman half the size of both the victim and the perpetrator, risking the safety of the mother of my children, to intervene in a certain bloody assault, or a potential murder.

The man watched us go by, raising his club, drunken fury in his limbs.

The police station. Angry, shocked, hopeless people in rows of uncomfortable government-issue plastic chairs. But here, she was safer. By then I had realized she was a foreign national, larger than life, her distress filled the room. Safer. And she had used my phone to call her brothers. They would likely be of greater help, if they shared her leonine genes. There is a place for the brutality of men, if it serves to protect the vulnerable.

I left, needing to get home to my own children as night came on. I washed her blood off my phone and the passenger seat of my car.

A week or so later I saw her by the side of the road, dressed to the nines, handing two robust little children of her own into a taxi. Suitcases in hand. It was over, she had saved herself with a little bit of help from a stranger, and likely some family.

Well done, girl.

Yesterday, I got a distress call from a neighbor - she'd been head-butted in the face by an unwelcome house guest, and beaten by her husband. She's sixty. It wasn't the first time she had needed medical attention for domestic violence. I loaded her shaking and crying into my car, made sure she got a once-over by our local doctor who paid us a house-call on a Sunday morning (some people are made out of God), ran her a bath, and left her to a medicated sleep in my bedroom while I cancelled my plans for the day and pottered about instead. Once she made a reappearance, I made a good meal for her, and bundled her into the car to head to the police station.

She was lost. Lost in the toxic universe of "he said, she said" message tomes on her phone. I had listened for a couple of hours to the sordid details. It was a belaboured radio soapy of revenge, distress, heartbreak and betrayal. On both sides. And not that interesting. I repeatedly recalled her attention to the fact: men are not allowed to hit women. The police are her protectors. Lay a charge, get a paper trail going. Don't ask "what if" rhetorical questions, do scenario planning. Get out. Save yourself.

Will she? Time will tell. I can't save her, I have myself to save. Daily. From the trails life sends my way. I'll help, but not get sucked into the dramas. I've had enough of my own.

I've faced the menace of a violent man, more than once. And I know this to be a useful principle: a man can raise his hand to me only once. He will never get a second opportunity.