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October is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month.
“One out of every four women will experience abuse in their lifetime.”*
We start the show with breaking news of Esha Momeni, who was recently arrested in Iran and sent to Evin Prison. Esha is a graduate student at Cal State Northridge. We interviewed Mr. Omid Koohi, a fellow friend of Esha and a volunteer for the One Million Signature Campaign. To learn more about the current status of Esha, visit this blog.
We also spoke to woman’s rights activist Pouran Mehdizadeh about Domestic Violence in our community, and her advise on the issue. Check out the organization she helps lead: Iranian Human Rights Organization
We continue with a discussion with Co-hosts Iman, Behnoush, Maral, and ZEiman, telling our personal stories and reflections on this very serious yet important topic.
More info:
CORA website: http://www.corasupport.org/
National Coalition against Domestic Violence: http://www.ncadv.org/
National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-SAFE (or visit http://www.ndvh.org/)
*Source: http://www.hvpress.net/news/126/ARTICLE/5455/2008-10-22.html
3 comments
This was an interesting subject and a very informative discussion. Here are my comments:
1- I don’t know how one can separate religion and culture especially in an eastern country like Iran. I believe that the religion and culture are mixed so it is very hard to distinguish the two and be able to find the roots of violence in one and not the other. Historically men always considered themselves superior than women and you can see it even in the US and western history. This is not an acceptable belief anymore and should be replaced.
2- One of you mentioned that 1 out of 3 in US is being abused and the question was asked that how come we are missing those. I think you don’t see 1 out of 3 being abused in your friends and family because you are a group of educated people who are surrounded by others like yourselves. You are not involved with those people. Having said that I don’t believe that education means you are automatically free of any wrong doing. Again the individual behavior is very complex and the source of their actions is not always easily identified.
3- I think the first 45 minutes of your show was very misleading especially when you were saying that even asking your partner things like: “who were you talking to?” or “where were you?” are signs of violence. At that point I was thinking WOW, what kind of conversation is OK then. But at the end when you guys talked about the pattern of abuse and how to identify an abusive behavior, it was very informative and useful.
4- The last thing I want to mention is that when we are trying to look at the subjects that we know are not evaluated equally in western and eastern cultures we need to be more careful. Things get more complicated when you have a mixture.
Keep up the good work and thanks.
Reza jaan,
Thank you for posting your comments. You brought up some very good points. I completely agree with you on the issue of cultural and religious ideologies playing a big role in this. It is unfortunate but true that when we talk about traditions of inequalities between men and women, the roots of these traditions are mostly religious or based on unreal cultural formations and customs. I truly believe that we need to put aside this myth about our Iranian culture being the richest and the best, and start working on ourselves to modify and improve the way we live and interact with others. I do not deny the fact that we have a beautiful culture, but any culture has some dark side to it as well, and we definitely need to be aware of that and always thrive to improve it.
I am also very glad that you brought up point #4, it is a tremendous help when we know what a listener perceives when we present our points, that way we can work on our ways of delivering and make our program better for all of our listeners. The point there was “excessive” control becomes abusive and could lead to major problems. I would definitely listen to that section again and encourage my co-hosts to do the same so we can pickup on the reasons we were not clear and misleading.
Thanks again for communicating your thoughts.
Best wishes,
Iman
Thank you for sharing all the links. They are very informative. I hope more women would finally have the courage to come out and report any form of violence in their homes. Calling for help is the first step to eradicating this worldwide problem.