In the first three months of this year, 59 cases of domestic violence cases were attended by Parihar Family Counselling Centre - Vanitha Sahayavani, Office of the Commissioner of Police. According to the centre, the cases have been increasing every year and the department has now classified them into four categories – sexual, physiological, mental and economical – in a bid to understand them better and attend to each of them according to the kind of abuse.
Rani Shetty, Parihar in-charge, stated that domestic violence cases are very sensitive and that is the main reason the officials decided to separate them into categories to pay required attention. “The affected party is counselled along with the family members to help counsellers gain more insight into the issue. We help them go back and live in a comfortable family environment,” Shetty told CE.
Counsellors often attend to cases where women are harassed by their husbands or in-laws for their looks. “For instance, there are cases wherein women are expected to look like a 20-year-old when they are in their mid-thirties. They suffer from depression due to constant abuse,” Bindya Yohannan, a counsellor at Parihar, said, talking about a case in which a 35-year-old auto driver abused his wife physically and sexually every day under the influence of alcohol.
“The wife suffers from endometriosis, a painful disorder affecting the uterus. Despite the pain, she continued living with her husband as she was economically dependent on him. When the situation became worse, she reached out to Parihar for help and underwent a uterus operation. Both the parties were counselled together and the situation is better now,” Yohannan recalled. “This was a pretty intense case where we had to counsel the man every three days to protect his wife from harassment,” she added.