POVERTY AND VIOLENCE

Gary Haugen in his TED talk "The hidden reason for poverty the world needs to address now", raises a very important issue that is often swept under the carpet while discussing poverty mitigation. The effect that violence has on the poor, the helplessness experienced by victims, especially women, who fall within the poverty bracket, when laws are not enforced, when the protection that is deemed to be their right is just an illusion, is jarring.

Several largescale poverty mitigation programmes are in operation, that help sponsor a girl's education at school or that provide microloans for women to set up their own small scale enterprise to earn a sustainable income.

But what if the the proposed beneficiary can never leave the house? What if she cannot even think about working a regular job because her husband will be violent if she interacts with other men? What if the teenage girl who loves going to school is afraid that while she walks back in the evening, she will have to face harassment, eve teasing or even worse? What of the woman who manages to work 3 jobs a day but then looses all her earning to a drunken and violent husband at home who claims his right over everything she has? What if the girl is a slave, well hidden from the law enforcers through bribery or through sheer brute criminal force?

Is there a failiure of community here, the unwillingness of the weak and the strong to help the weak, or is it more a question of a huge gap in understanding that leads to policies and releif measures that are not holistic? Measures that dont bring light to the darkest truths that form the web or poverty and which only bring paltry releif to communities that have been surviving within it for generations.