Ready For Change

Dr Haliza Zurah opens up to Poon Li-Wei on how she’s challenging our misogynistic culture that breeds domestic violence.

- Haliza Zurah

It’s three in the afternoon on a weekday when a woman pulls up in front of a police station in Sarawak, bruised and battered. She lodges a report and no, she hasn’t been robbed – she’s been beaten by her husband, and it isn’t the first time. Hailing from a female-centric background with a loving father figure who was never once above housework, and having pursued medicine in Ireland, Dr Haliza Zurah is the last person you’d peg to stay on in an abusive relationship. But for eight long years, she took it all. “I didn’t know bad men existed; that showed how naive I was,” she sighs, driving home the fact that our reality demands it be common knowledge.

“You constantly make excuses for them”

Perhaps it’s more comforting to think that abuse happens in a blink of an eye – that an individual you love merely had his switch flipped for a regrettable second. But the more disturbing truth is that the seeds of an abusive personality have been sown long before, you just chose to turn a blind eye to them. It was truly only when he requested that she take a personal loan so that he could buy a motorbike, which would eventually snowball into a request for a car and capital to open his own business, did the warning bells really sound off in her head. As she tells me, chipping away and restraining the financial means of another is also very much part of an abusive cycle. Today, those are the nafkah tertunggak claims she has filed in syariah court.

“The first time won’t be the last”