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Spousal battery must be `killed`
2007-06-24 09:18:30
By Editor
Darkness, and in some cases an illuminated night-time setting, is associated with evil. One of these is spousal battery - the physical, beastly assault on wives by their husbands, which also covers male and female companions who may not necessarily be formally married.
Some men are victims of similar attacks by their female partners, but the fraction is negligible, mainly because in fights, masculine might often triumphs over relative feminine weakness. And bullied men feel shy to make disclosures of their plight.
In varying degrees of frequency and severity, some women are battered by men as a presumed punishment for real and imagined wrong-doing.
The choice of night-time, but usually in a fully lit bedroom or other parts of a home to enable the attacker see and pounce on the target ``properly``, is predicated on the need to minimise exposure.
Some neighbours witness or get wind of the barbaric attacks. Otherwise, the outside world is kept in the dark; first because the victims suffer in silence for fear of reprisals, to protect the dubious dignity of their partners, or for the sake of protecting their marriages.
It is thus preferred that the scandal of bedrooms being turned into battlegrounds be kept as an internal affair.
Meanwhile, many battered women cook up lies to explain away their injuries, and in public - including in the eyes of visitors at homes - they put up a show of happy wives, mothers or partners.
Misunderstandings, which breed quarrels, are a feature of human life. There are, however, civilised ways of resolving them, chief of which is dialogue and reconciliation forums. Physical assaults are a crude form of primitivity.
Spousal battery - a subject featured elsewhere in this newspaper - fits that framework. It is grossly inhuman. It must be stamped out.
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