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Despite surveys showing high levels of domestic violence in Thailand, attitudes don’t seemed to have changed and this latest case is another sad example
BANGKOK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - What do you do if your ex-girlfriend, whom you physically abused, goes to police and makes a complaint? If you are Boonyasit Thammarojpinit, the son of a successful Thai businessman, you threaten to sue for defamation.
According to Thai newspaper Khaosod, Boonyasit didn’t deny hitting her. His issue was the fact that she is bringing this up now, when according to him, he hadn’t “hurt her at all since the beginning of this year”.
Besides, “he only resorted to violence because he loved her very much and wanted to stop her flirtatious behavior,” Khaosod reported.
Sitting next to his lawyer, he also told journalists last week that the picture of his 21-year-old ex-girlfriend - who called herself Ploy and is now asking for police protection - with injuries is linked to an incident that happened “years ago”.
The image on a mobile phone shows a woman with eyes closed, hair dishevelled and a large, dark bruise on her left eye.
He added he’s willing to forgive Ploy, who moved in with him in 2010 when she was still 18, but will “seek fairness” through a lawsuit because the allegations are false.
This is a shocking example of impunity combined blatant disregard for a woman’s well-being, not to mention a bizarre understanding of the law, but it’s not an isolated incident in Thailand.
MORE AWARENESS OR MORE ABUSE?
An academic from Mahidol University who has been conducting annual studies on family happiness said last week that almost a third of the 4,000 respondents she surveyed in 2012 reported domestic abuse.
Wimontip Musikaphan, a lecturer at the National Institute for Child and Family Development, told Thomson Reuters Foundation this is “unusually high”, as the rate was only 13.8 percent in 2011. She added that she stood by the accuracy of her research.
Even taking into account the bias resulting from random sampling - Wimontip acknowledged the rate increases when there are more urban respondents than rural ones, an indication perhaps of more awareness and access to help in urban areas - and the possibility that more women are reporting abuse, it is still a worrying figure.
Besides, more women reporting itself isn’t going to help much if the attitudes of officials and average Thais towards domestic violence don’t change.
A U.N. report in 2010 showed that more than 60 percent of Thais thought it justifiable for a man to beat his wife, higher than Indonesia (less than 20 percent) and India (about 40 percent).
Earlier this month, British celebrity chef Nigella Lawson and her multimillionaire art collector husband Charles Saatchi became embroiled in a domestic violence scandal when pictures emerged of him repeatedly grabbing his wife by the throat in a restaurant.
Sure, Saatchi, who denied abuse, got off only with a caution, but there was a public furor and an open debate on domestic violence. Here, there have been no similar calls. I wonder whether it’s because Ploy is not a celebrity.
Would it take more abuse victims like Areewan - a former beauty queen and abused wife who later became a constitutional law expert and a vocal women’s rights activist - for people to take domestic abuse seriously?
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