Panic Room for Battered Women
Remember Jodi Foster’s movie Panic Room? Now us normal folk can have one too.
A new “sanctuary scheme” in the UK is offering women funding to create safe (panic) rooms in their own homes complete with mortise locks, reinforced doors, and security lights. The police would have a record of homes with safe rooms and would theoretically respond even more quickly if a woman is under attack. (Although that doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense if they’re esconced in a safe room. Might as well go to another home first that doesn’t have a safe room, right?)
Minister for Women and Equality Meg Munn:
It’s important that it’s part of a range of support, it’s not just about providing a room and not doing anything else.
Of course, taking somebody to court is enormously important but women get very frightened, they perhaps have been threatened, it may well be that there’s insufficient evidence for somebody to be taken to court.
This will work for some women but not for all women. It’s been tested in some areas and 90% of women are satisfied with that and it’s enabled them to feel safer and lead a more normal life.
I wonder what criteria they’ll use to determine if a woman deserves financial help with the creation of a safe room especially if they didn’t have enough evidence to take their abuser to court. If it were me, I’d rather just get the heck out and find some way of getting that person off the street. Not saying that I’d become a vigilante or anything but sometimes self-defense is needed.
BBC News, December 19, 2006
Tags: domestic violence, battered women, womens health, womens issues, women, health, abuse
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POSTED IN: Body, Mind, Spirit, Stress, Women's Issues
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