One in four women in Wales will experience violence at the hands of a partner during their lives and on average a female victim of domestic violence is assaulted 35 times before her first call to the police. The first time you come across this statistic, it is shocking, but the more you hear it, the less of an impact it has and the shock soon disappears. But behind the stats are women with real life experiences of suffering violence and abuse purely because of their gender. These are women from all types of background, professions, class, religion, ethnicity and age.
This blog's aim is to show the human stories behind the statistics in order to bring home the severity of the issue. It demonstrates that this is happening in ALL of our communities, in our streets and in our villages and to people we know and love.
Domestic abuse and violence against women is not talked about in our society largely due to the fact that women do not speak out about their experiences. They somehow feel that they are to be blamed for being a victim and therefore the severity and incidence of the problem is largely ignored by most in society, as if it doesn’t exist. After all it’s easier to try and ignore the issue rather than try and deal with it, isn’t it?
This is the second part of my campaign to bring more attention to the prevalence of this issue. The first part gained a lot of media attention when 3 AMs admitted to being victims or rape and 1 of domestic violence. Those stats aren’t as shocking as they seem, they follow national trends and I suspect that there are more experiences with the Assembly than the anonymous poll indicates. The shocking thing is that it took politicians to speak out, albeit anonymously to get attention to the issue.
I’m calling on the One Wales Assembly Government to fund an awareness raising campaign to challenge attitudes towards violence against women, both domestic abuse and otherwise. Abuse can take numerous forms: physical, emotional, psychological, and financial and it’s about time we opened up this debate and challenged the attitudes that exist, for the good of the whole of Welsh society.
Finally I’d like to thank the brave women who have had the courage to write about their experiences here. If you would like to contribute anonymously you can contact me at nerys.evans@wales.gov.uk
We now all look towards the Welsh Government to take a lead in challenging this behaviour.
Nerys
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2 comments:
We fully support AM Nerys Evans' attempts to get the issue of domestic abuse, still very much a hidden problem, on everyone's radar. Launching a blog for victims to write about their experiences, will hopefully stop it from being so "hidden". BMA Cymru Wales also backs Nerys' calls for the WAG to fund an awareness-raising campaign, aimed at changing people's attitudes towards violence against women.
One way of helping with this would be for all doctors and health professionals to be given training in dealing with domestic abuse, which we've called for in a previous BMA report focusing on the issue.
Key recommendations from this report include:
All health professionals should receive training in identifying and helping patients who are victims of domestic abuse – this needs to be implemented on a national scale within emergency medicine.
Health professionals should ask patients appropriate questions in a sensitive and non-threatening manner, to encourage disclosure of abusive experiences.
Health professionals should recognise that men can also be victims of domestic abuse.
The government should promote a ‘zero-tolerance’ attitude to domestic abuse.
Refuges should be more accessible to transgender, lesbian, gay, bisexual individuals.
Domestic abuse education programmes should be implemented in all primary and secondary schools.
Hopefully, "humanising" domestic abuse in the form of victims blogging about their experiences, will make us all, including politcians, sit up and take notice.
Well done for starting this blog Nerys.
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