Recently an old classmate from graduate school wrote a moving post on the eve of her being called to the bar: coincidentally it is the same day as the death anniversary of her close friend, who was sexually assaulted and killed when they were very young women. My classmate now works to help victims of sexual and domestic violence.
Violence � of any kind — is very far from my mind in Singapore. NUS sent us a campus safety survey last month and I couldn’t rate any of their services from 1-5: I didn’t know what services they had. American colleges on the other hand are constantly reminding students to travel in pairs or to request campus escort services when walking home late at night, to know where the nearest emergency �blue phones� are. (I don’t know if NUS has escort services, who knows, maybe we do, but the point is I don’t feel I need to find out, and I don’t care if we don’t.) At the end of a group evening in Charlottesville or Cambridge, cities I think of as safe cities, if no one else was heading for the same dormitory, a male friend would usually detach himself from the group and insist on walking home with me, even if it meant he has to walk back to the other end of campus afterwards. I remember how, when I wanted to answer an emergency call for translators at the hospital once (it was only 9pm or so) my roommate was scandalised and insisted on calling escort for me. It is simply and habitually understood as a fundamental part of American campus safety culture. (�Don’t let a friend walk alone,� was one of the university safety slogans.)
But this abundance of caution always felt unreal to me, as if my compliance was a kind of playacting. I grew up afterall in a country where I am accustomed to taking public safety for granted. In Singapore male friends wouldn’t blink twice about your going home alone, and I don’t expect them to either (some of the more considerate ones might call you a cab or wait with you until your bus came.) In fact, in the US when a male friend did not walk me home late at night, it is invariably because I’d been out with a group of Singaporeans. Years later, living in Singapore again, I felt a twinge of annoyance leaving the apartment of a partner, because he had not come downstairs with me to get a cab. It is, I thought, 2 in the morning, did he not care if I had any trouble getting home, just because it was a nuisance his having to dress again? And then of course, a moment later I laughed to myself — but this is Singapore, we know nothing will happen, why should I begrudge him this little thing? (Not that this isn’t a strange inverted sexism too: I was thinking about this last month, when someone declined my offer to be on a legal project because there may be �gang violence� involved. (I didn’t even know Singapore still had any �underworld� or �gangs� but apparently they exist.) It is for my own safety. They don’t want the responsibility of having failed to protect me if someone attacked me. Do I say, don’t assume that as a woman I’m inherently vulnerable to physical and sexual violence and would be a liability! But on the other hand, that is exactly what an American university assumes about me when I try to go home alone.)
Then again this sense of safety from gender violence I feel so assured of in Singapore is framed only in terms of public safety: of course no one jumped out at your behind bushes in Singapore. What happens here is what happens elsewhere: violence from dating partners. Et in Arcadia. Last semester I worked 3.5 hours a week manning a legal helpdesk and in 35 hours i saw 3 victims of partner violence. Women with bruised faces, swollen eyes, marks on their necks, hearing loss (I thought of the Wyf of Bathe and her Janson immediately). If these are just the people who decide to come forward, and only the ones who happen to come during my shift. How many are there in fact over the entire year, over the whole population?
I frame the question in terms of �dating partners� because this is the specific problem in our law: in Singapore you cannot get a personal protection order against your abusive boyfriend or even a live-in partner: only against a spouse. So you must file a criminal complaint against him. Now sometimes, in assault, abuse or harrassment cases, if the parties are dating partners the magistrate will order mediation instead of initiating prosecution. Asian society, no? If there is an pre-existing intimate relationship it is much better we try and remedy the situation with �soft methods�.. And the state pays for the mediation, which is, on the whole, probably a far better use of taxpayers’ money than full-blown legal proceedings. I think that is the sensible thing to do in many cases.
But sometimes, I wonder if in some cases we have sent victims back home with insufficient safeguards against their continued abuse. And I’ve observed that even if a woman owns the home outright and the abusive live-in partner is there on bare licence, she often does not dare to evict. Once, listening to someone tell her story, I found myself wanting to say: It’s your house and he’s been hurting you, the fact that you came to us means you’re frightened and desperate. Do you want to wait till he hurts you very badly? Put his things outside, change your locks, go stay with a friend for a few days. But I bite my tongue. If an abusive person is incensed by eviction, what is to stop him from lying in wait for her and hurting her even more badly? What right have I to blithely advise her to open defiance if it leads her to greater danger if I cannot concurrently guarantee her safety? Because when I ask her to stand on her rights, I assume she has the personal (including financial) resources to assert those rights. She may not. She most probably does not. Women from low-income households are at disproportionate risk of domestic and sexual violence: even when they have the courage to act and have been given knowledge of what to do, we may not have made it financially viable for them to vindicate those rights and to obtain the protection they need.
So each time I go back to the question of why dating violence feels so remote for me personally. I don’t want the answer simply to come down to economic class in the end. (At first I also said, perhaps I am in a better position to trust that the type of men I date will not inflict violence on me? For isn’t the fact that we are even able to simulate violence as part of sexual play a measure of how secure we feel — because otherwise how can we reenact casually something that would be so degrading for someone else? But that’s even more patronising, if I did believe that, and completely unfair. Because everyone trusts a dating partner right up till the point they can’t. And gender violence on college campuses is well-documented.) If economic class has to do with it, and it must do, and it is different for me, then it is because of this: if it ever happens to me one day however degrading or traumatic it will be I know I will still be capable of some things: I can afford to seek medical attention for my injuries and professional psychological support for my emotional recovery. I am capable of making a police report and initiating legal proceedings both for redress of what has been done and to protect myself from repeat assault. I can do this not just because I will not be cowering under stigma real or imagined, but also because I have the professional connections, knowledge, and financial resources to see a doctor, get a therapist, consult a solicitor, hire an advocate, even access the media. Have we made it financially and not just legally possible for them to access the same resources I have outlined for myself? That is something worth finding out.
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