A message of hope: Rumana Monzur, whose husband tried to kill her, tells victims of abuse they have options
Credit to Author: Gordon McIntyre| Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2019 02:00:18 +0000
When Rumana Monzur was a little girl growing up in Dhaka she dreamed of becoming a pilot.
There were no female pilots she knew of to provide a role model, she just imagined how liberating flying the wild blue yonder must be.
“You know when you are young you are just thinking about different things and I guess I always loved my freedom,” she said. “And I guess when you are just flying like a bird and you’re taking people with you and everything depends on you but you can’t see anyone else around you, you have all that freedom and liberty.
“I guess that’s what made me interested in that profession.”
Instead, she chose rising sea levels and environmentalism as her field of study because her home country, Bangladesh, is at risk more than most places from climate change.
Then everything changed.
Monzur was a 32-year-old graduate student and Fulbright scholar at the University of B.C. in 2011 when she returned to Dhaka to tell her estranged and abusive husband she wanted a divorce. He reacted by trying to rip her eyes out with his hands, biting off the end of her nose and ripping flesh off her cheeks and one arm.
“I wanted to kill you with acid, but good for you I couldn’t find any,” he had hissed.
The attack left her blind, but that’s for context, it’s not what this story is about: This story is about hope.
“I don’t want to be portrayed as a victim or someone who should be pitied,” Monzur said, sitting in a coffee shop a block from the Justice Canada offices on Howe Street where she serves as counsel.
And, indeed, a documentary that will make its broadcast debut Nov. 24 on the Documentary Channel, called Untying the Knot, aims “to give women who are suffering violence a message for hope,” Monzur said.
After doctors were unable to restore her sight — today she wears beautiful amber contact lenses and a lovely new nose — she decided to write the exam to enter law. Her friends thought she was nuts. But she ignored them, passed the exam and today is a lawyer with the federal Justice Department.
What kept her going after being blinded and brutalized?
“What I told myself is, ‘You have three options now,’ ” she said with a smile. “I told myself, ‘You just fell in the garbage, what can you do now?’ Either I can stay there, or I can try to stand up slowly, or I can stand up as quickly as possible and start to move forward.
“As you can see, the last option was the most acceptable and so I chose that. I didn’t want to stay in that garbage. I didn’t want to lose hope.”
Nov. 25 has been declared International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women: “In all societies, to varying degrees, women and girls are subjected to physical, sexual and psychological abuse that cuts across lines of income, class and culture,” the UN says.
The agency also says one-in-three women worldwide have been physically or sexually assaulted, while that number is one-in-five in Canada: “Such violence is recognized as a violation of human rights and a form of discrimination against women, reflecting the pervasive imbalance of power between women and men.”
Syeed Hasan Sumon, by the way, the husband who would rather have killed her than see her succeed on her own, died in custody of an apparent heart attack six months after the vicious assault while awaiting trial for attempted murder.
In hindsight, Monzur realizes she should have left her abuser earlier.
“It is hard to have the courage to stand up to social norms, social stigma,” she said. “That mindset that if we talked about it it’s shameful for yourself, it’s not at all like that. I thought like that too, that if I share it with anyone it’s a shame for myself.
“I wanted to look like I was happy in my marriage, that made me socially acceptable, that’s what I thought.”
Of course, it’s the abuser who should be feeling the shame.
So her advice for women in abusive relationships? The first thing to know is there are options, she said.
“The power has to come from within. I didn’t have the courage to stand up for myself for a long, long time, and look how I ended up, right? I paid a huge price. I want them to know their lives are precious and they should not accept something which deteriorates their capacity and potential. Life is full of opportunities, they need to know there is always a way out of those abusive and brutal relationships, it’s not their fate.
“Not only women — men, children and elderly people, violence is not something worth tolerating, you need to get out of it as soon as possible.”