Jennifer's futile cry

JENNIFER OLIVER, 34, is afraid that the domestic violence she has endured for the past year will end in her death. The critical question is, who can this distraught woman now turn to for protection and safety? She has taken her plight to the press. She has appealed to the Police for help, relating to them the physical abuse she has suffered and the threats made to her life. Last December she obtained from the Court a restraining order against the man, but the violence inflicted upon her continues. In other words, the young mother of seven children has done everything she possibly could to end the ordeal of terror she has experienced for more than a year, but to no avail. Oliver remains vulnerable as she must work to take care of her children — she is a live-in maid caring for an elderly person who lives a few blocks away from her assailant's home in Maracas Valley.

We emphasise again: The authorities, particularly the Police, must find ways to protect brutalised and endangered women such as Jennifer Oliver. As a so-called civilised society, our failure to take measures, find ways or respond in a manner that would rescue our women from this kind of relentless and gratuitous savagery has become something of a national disgrace. Indeed, we must now consider Oliver's dreadful situation as a test case. If, after taking her plight to the Press, to the Police and to the Courts, she can obtain no protection and she is either maimed or killed, then her blood will be upon an unheeding society in general and the authorities responsible for ensuring the safety of our citizens in particular. In relating her story to the Press, Oliver said the abuse began a few months after she moved in with the man. "He got angry with me one day and hit me with a concrete block on my hip," she said. Last Thursday night after work she was attacked by the man while waiting for a taxi at Warata in Maracas. Oliver, showing the bruises, said she was beaten all over her body. "He kicked me in my head and my ribs. It was so painful," she recalled, her eyes filling with tears. "He then dragged me from where I was to his home. He took me by my neck and started to choke me. He pulled out a knife, pressed it into my chest and said he would kill me. I got frightened because I thought he was going to kill me. I started to scream. Somebody heard the commotion and Police because they pulled up the same time.

He quickly put the knife in his pocket." Amazingly enough, the Police did nothing about the incident. Instead of arresting her assailant and charging him for the brutal assault, the Police officers released him. This again typifies the cavalier approach of the Police to domestic situations in which women are seriously battered and face dire threats to their lives. What is the point of such women obtaining restraining orders from the Court and appealing to the Police if their desperate cry for help meets with such scant regard or concern? It is time for the Police to wake up and smell the horror of their neglect to act decisively in such cases. The murder statistics of our country are littered with the blood of women who could find no one to protect them from angry men who believe they had an inalienable right to inflict such abuse and violence. The latest of such victims was Juliette Cummings whose throat was slit by a man who attacked her while sitting in a maxi taxi in Princes Town a few weeks ago. One would have thought that her slaughter would have produced the kind of outrage that would compel some positive action. But no. And now it seems to be Oliver's turn. So much for our civilised society.