Shattered, burned and bruised, Azza went to the police four times before the authorities allowed her to leave her abusive husband and move into a shelter. In their 12 years together, her husband had beaten her with metal rods, chained her up and poured boiling water on her. But police usually sent her back home after her husband signed a pledge to stop mistreating his wife. “When I went back home the beatings gradually got worse,” said Azza, now divorced and living in the recently-opened Abdulaziz Shelter in Jeddah. “The violence escalated even more and he started chaining me so that I could not run away. He blocked all the windows.” She finally escaped four years ago through the bathroom window, though she broke bones in her pelvis in the process. She obtained a divorce on grounds her husband was schizophrenic. Domestic violence came dramatically into the media spotlight in 2004 when TV presenter Rania Al-Baz went public over a savage beating from her husband in which she suffered 13 facial fractures, leading to divorce at her instigation. An official human rights body was set up in 2004. A total of 978 reports have been sent to the National Society for Human Rights (NSHR) since then concerning physical and mental abuse, divorce and inheritance rights and even the right to education. The National Family Safety Program (NFSP) was launched last year to create awareness about safe community and defend individuals' rights and helps the victims of domestic violence. The aim of this unique program is to establish a safe, collaborative, and cooperative environment that resists domestic violence through activation of national culture which respects the rights of individuals, especially the most vulnerable such as women, children, the elderly and people with special needs. A number of shelters have been set up by volunteers with Ministry of Social Affairs approval. According to reports, currently around 3,000 Saudi women officially registered as runaways. The rise in runaways has led to fears of the breakdown of the Saudi family and the inroads of Western values that seem to put more emphasis on individual desires than family duty. “We used to be a closed society and now we are opening up,” said Enaam Al-Raboei, head of the Family Protection Committee which thinks the spread of the Internet and satellite television has Westernised Saudi youth attitudes. Al-Raboei said that girls who report abuse are often in fact rebelling against social tradition and refusing their parent's right to discipline their children. “We try to explain to them that what they are going through is not abuse,” she said, referring to some cases where no physical violence is involved. Social worker Sameera Al-Ghamdi said there was a compromise to be reached that included the idea of basic rights for women. “When we are confronted with a society that assigns a certain sacred status to its culture and specific traditions, we start by demanding basic rights,” she said. “People in this society have grown up to believe it is the father's right to strike his wife and children and prevent them from certain liberties if he wants to.”
