“While seeing what a mess my life was, I tried, I tried to run away into a world where they’d never know me or my past or for that matter nobody would care for that type of details” .
Studies of women sexually abused as girls find that onset of drug and alcohol abuse, self- harm, depression, suicidal ideation, relationship disturbances, running away from home and entry into prostitution are frequent negative consequences of child sexual abuse. Longer duration and severity of abuse appear to increase the risk of negative outcomes. Trauma at early stages of development may alter brain chemistry and cognitive functioning, interfering with concentration, school performance and the capacity to discern and interpret cues from the environment regarding danger and risk. Flashbacks, hyper vigilance and emotional flooding may alternate with states of psychological numbing or dissociation. The desire for relief from trauma symptoms may lead survivors to self-medicate with drugs or alcohol to invoke the numbing state; on the other hand, numbing may lead some survivors to engage in risk-taking and self-injury behaviours in order to feel alive again.
“Man can never be a woman's equal in the spirit of selfless service with which nature has endowed her.”
Mohandas Gandhi
As correctly put by an ample number of men, a women is not a toy, she is something which cannot be put into words for the services she renders without any conditions are the ones which make this universe run. She is seen in as many roles as possible, she can be a home-maker and can be a successful business woman, she can be the mother of your child and your best friend, and she is what defines beauty, a beauty of its own kind.
Despite of the very fact of woman being portrayed as the helpless one, there would be men who’d be courageous enough to admit that it’s the other way round but there are men who’d try to prove their esteem and superiority and hurt the female and hence the risk of taking them to a road less travelled.
Violence perpetrated against women and girls can put them at risk for incarceration by forcing abused girls and women into the criminal justice system not as victims, but as "offenders" in the eyes of the state. The processes that transform victims into offenders are the "criminalization" of women's survival strategies, "entrapment" into crime by abusers and by gender, race and class oppression, and "enforcement violence" by the state through coercive laws, immigration policies, social welfare policies and law enforcement practices.
A heart cries, for the feelings lay dead.
A victim of domestic violence for over 20 years, more often than not, Lisa Rappa turned to drugs for relief, rather than to police.
“I become comfortably numb,” says 42-year-old Rappa. “The whole idea of doing drugs is that you don’t feel. You don’t want to cry.”
Those years of abusive relationships left Rappa with one deaf ear and several scars on her face, and what’s more, a history in jail. She was arrested over 15 times, mostly due to drug-related offenses. And for the past 19 years, she was either in jail, in a drug treatment programs, or homeless in the streets.
Rappa is one of the overwhelming large numbers of female offenders in the United States reported to have been physically or sexually abused.
Woman, the guiding light behind men who have been looked up to, woman who is the sole creator of men; a woman is the one who selflessly devotes herself to her man yet faces inhumanity and cruelty, forced to run away into a land, unknown, unexplored.
Six pathways to incarceration are correlated with histories of abuse:
- Abused and runaway girls
- Street women and prostituted women
- Women with untreated addictions
- Women arrested for economic crimes, sometimes coerced by batterers
- Women arrested for harming others, either falsely or for defending themselves
- Women affected by enforcement of discriminatory and coercive welfare, immigration and corrections policies and drug laws.
Research shows that the overwhelming majority of women defendants in the criminal justice system have extensive histories of childhood and adult abuse that may result in homelessness, substance abuse and economic marginality that force them into survival by illegal means. Some women are coerced to engage in crime by battering partners or by partners' financial abuse, some are arrested for defending themselves against abuse, and others are arrested for not protecting their children from domestic violence.
Government surveys of state and federal prisoners estimate that 43% to 57% of women in state and federal prisons have been physically or sexually abused at some time in their lives. One-third of incarcerated women report child sexual abuse and 20% to 34% report abuse by an adult intimate partner; they have multiple abuse histories and are three to four times more likely than male prisoners to have abuse histories. While these rates may not be substantially higher than in the general population of women, these surveys probably under-report rates of abuse because they ask only a few general screening questions to determine victimization.
A woman is a creation of god who portrays selflessness, care, love; unconditional love yet some men fail to treat her with care.
She dies out of ignorance, exploitation, abuse and assault by the hands of those whose life she completes.
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