What About the Survivors?

 This blog post is from Brenna Streeter, Regent Law 2L, and current Family Law student:

 

People react after loved ones are arrested and removed from their families.  Image taken from Zoya Mateen, Assam: India Child Brides Desperate After Mass Arrests, BBC (10 Feb. 2023), https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-64564861.

But What About the Survivors?

In a world that focuses so much on justice and righting wrongs, Christians often are so busy advocating that they forget the victims of domestic violence and child marriage. While justice is important, so is helping women (and men) find resources where they can pick up the pieces of their life and start again.

The danger of focusing all of one’s energy on punishing criminals is evident in a recent BBC article, entitled “Assam: India Child Brides Desperate After Mass Arrests.” As Zoya Mateen, the author, discusses, hundreds of young women in the northern states of India are left without the primary breadwinner because their husbands were arrested for marrying them under the age of 18. Many women are pregnant, but unable to return to their own families because of the economic strain it causes. But India does not have the infrastructure or the resources to do little more than offer a simple payout to some of the suffering women.

India should be a cautionary tale. For all Christians involved in offering personal services to those who suffer domestic violence or child marriage—especially lawyers and lawmakers—please remember that the story is not over. The victim may have justice, but he or she needs experienced individuals who can point him or her to the proper resources to begin a new life.

 

Acts 20:35

In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”