Unfortunately, as mentioned before, gender-based violence is prevalent across Asia. In Thailand, Watcharapon Kukaewkasem, known as Sia, also had a brush with abuse. Only it didn’t happen to her—it happened to her mother.

Hailing from a village in northern Thailand, Sia was was just seven years old when she watched her father beat up her mother in the middle of a local market. At the UN Women’s live storytelling event, Standing Up: Stories of Courage and Resilience, held in Bangkok in June 2023, Sia shared what it was like to go through that experience and how she found the courage to help her mother escape years later.

“That was not the first time my father beat up my mother … She tried to escape many times. Not until I was in my second year of university could I save enough money to hire a lawyer and get divorce papers for her. She never, never had to return to my dad again.”

Sia didn’t stop at helping her mum. In 2017, she started the Freedom Restoration Project (FRP), an NGO in Thailand that offers support to migrant women affected by abusive relationships and emergency shelters for survivors of domestic violence. 

Malik and Sia’s organisations are just two out of hundreds of charities operating across Asia to help women survivors every step of the way, from rescue to rehabilitation. Not only do these organisations offer support to a wide range of survivors—including victims of sex trafficking, acid attack, domestic abuse, sexual assault, and more—the support they provide is also varied: it includes rescue work, medical aid, shelter, legal counselling, therapy and rehabilitation. The one thing that many of these organisations have in common, however, is that they were founded by individuals with the desire and dedication to help those in need.

One of those individuals was Indrani Sinha, a former teacher who—along with her husband Pinaki Sinha—founded Sanlaap in Kolkata, West Bengal, in 1989. The NGO operates in regions along the Indo-Bangladesh border to fight against sex trafficking and helps survivors reintegrate into society. And in 2017, Sanlaap helped form the School of Justice, a pre-professional school that helps former trafficking victims get into law school.

Indrani passed away in 2015, but Pinaki—who has carried on her work—shared with us what motivated them to start the NGO in the first place: “Indrani visited the brothels and came back home with terrible stories. Having two daughters ourselves, we felt we had to support the many women and children who knowingly or unknowingly are pushed into this flesh trade.”

Of course, different organisations experience different degrees of reach and recognition; and it never hurts to have well-known patrons.

Meer Foundation is perhaps one of the more well-known NGOs out there, and that has a lot to do with it being founded by Bollywood icon Shah Rukh Khan. This Mumbai-based charity works solely with acid attack survivors, and collaborates with sister organisations across India to support victims in a number of ways. This includes providing restorative surgeries after the attack, reintegration into society in the long run, and more.

Having the backing of a major Bollywood star means Meer Foundation doesn’t come up against the usual challenges of underfunding and lack of resources that befall many other NGOs. And perhaps because of the recognition, it is also able to create wide-ranging and long-lasting impact: “Our prominent position allows us to influence policies and engage in advocacy initiatives with policymakers to aid acid attack survivors and victims,” says Kanchan Yadav, the foundation’s spokesperson.

At the end of the day, while helping and supporting survivors is important work, it’s not enough. The bigger issue is that things need to change at a societal level so that they are not put through this trauma in the first place. To do that, a change in policies is necessary to create sustainable impact, because gender-based violence is merely the symptom—the tumour are issues deeply rooted within society. 

But there is no easy solution to this.

For example, “poverty is one of the biggest reasons behind why women get sold. We need to alleviate poverty first and that’s no easy task,” said Bidhya Bista, coordinator of ABC Nepal, the first anti-human trafficking charity in the country. “Also, there isn’t enough awareness in Nepal. Textbook education is not enough. The education system needs to include sexual awareness topics so that women don’t get lured into sex slavery in hopes of a better livelihood.”

Sadly, it is not uncommon for young girls to be sold by their impoverished families, and then being sold again after being rescued and returned to their families because their financial situation has not improved. Even more upsettingly, rescuers often find that the survivors have forgotten their families because “a lot of girls are trafficked at a very young age, and can’t even recall their parents or hometown. In some cases, when they do remember, the family denies even knowing them,” says Bista. “[In those cases,] we reach out to the local councillors [to mediate with the family]. We don’t tell the survivors that they aren’t accepted. We instead encourage them to lead their own lives.”

“Besides educating women, the police forces need to be educated, too,” Pinaki of Sanlaap says. “They, especially the border forces, need to be properly trained so that they can quickly and correctly identify a victim while they are still in the process of being trafficked, and then deal with them empathetically.”

Something else that is desperately needed, according to Malik, is a robust implementation of the laws. “The governments have issued an order to monitor acid sale, but in reality it can be bought very easily at retail shops for only a small sum of money, and there’s no record that’s kept of who bought it,” she said. “This makes it harder to prove criminal cases in a court of law. We need more fast-track courts and the conviction ratio needs to go up.”

Another thing to consider, from the perspective of the survivors, is that even seeking justice is a continuous echo of the trauma they’ve lived through. Not only is reporting sexual assault often an exceptionally distressing experience for victims, due to the stigma attached to sexual violence and the victim-blaming mentality that is unfortunately not uncommon, but the experience of giving evidence for these criminal cases should it reach a court of law is also generally quite a harrowing one for survivors when the invasive legal process requires them to recount deeply personal and traumatic experiences in detail. 

With Hong Kong widely considered a fairly safe city for women, it might seem like gender-based abuse wouldn’t be as pervasive here. Unfortunately, this is still very much a reality that exists in our city. In 2022, the Hong Kong Women’s Coalition of Equal Opportunities surveyed more than 1,000 women aged 15 to 64 and interviewed 30 of those surveyed, and found that more than 35 per cent of the respondents had experienced some kind of sexual violence.

As ever, those most susceptible to abuse are the vulnerable and underrepresented. Tatler spoke to a 21-year-old domestic helper of Indian origin, speaking on conditions of anonymity, who was abused by her employer in Hong Kong. “My employer used to hurl expletives and make passes of a sexual nature at me when his wife wasn’t at home. I tolerated it for months because I had no way of proving it,” she told us.

Ultimately, she found the courage to contact Help for Domestic Workers, a charity that provides aid and support for Hong Kong’s migrant domestic helpers. But she didn’t want to report the abuse officially; instead she just wanted to reach a settlement with her employer and go back home—and the NGO helped her with that.

Manisha Wijesinghe, the NGO’s executive director, shared with us that this is not an infrequent occurrence in Hong Kong. “We come across quite a few cases of migrant domestic workers who are vulnerable to abuse in Hong Kong. They don’t have access to adequate information, often they don’t speak the language, so the government’s support programmes are not practically accessible to them. Many who face abuse just want the least troublesome way out of it and don’t want to get into legal trappings,” said Wijesinghe.

While this may be a sufficient solution for individual cases, this effectively means that there could be many cases that are unreported. For every survivor who raises their voice, there could be several others who suffer in silence. This again reinforces that it’s only when society’s mindset transforms that there can be real change. And much needs to be done—from implementing stricter laws and spreading awareness to destigmatising survivors and practising active empathy.

The fight against gender-based violence is going to be a long one that is full of seemingly impassable obstacles and likely many more casualties, and not all stories will make themselves heard. So the least we can do is to get the conversation going about these women’s experiences, and keep them going. We can also advocate for or shine a spotlight on the organisations that are helping them every step of the way; and trust that these are all small steps going in the right direction.

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