Sonia's face conveys all the emotions of someone who has spent 13 years counselling women trapped in the horror that is an abusive relationship. (Sonia is not her real name, as using it could reveal the identities of the women she has helped.)

The face has a quiet strength and determination but also a realism - a realism that comes from knowing that for every woman who succeeds in leaving her abuser, one or more stay in an abusive relationship.

She has seen women who've been battered black and blue. She has talked to women whose husbands threatened to kill the wife's parents if she went to the authorities. She has helped women whose husbands disconnected the phone line when they left for work to ensure their wife's isolation. The couples come from different ethnic groups. As Sonia points out, violence against women knows no cultural boundaries.

There is nothing that can shock Sonia. In a workshop she organized for immigrant couples, a husband stood up and said: “I am the god. The woman is nothing.”

Indo-Canadian, Sonia once received threats from males in her community for organizing a conference on family violence. Those who threatened her said: ‘There is no abuse in our community. What do you think you're doing?'

“In the Indo-Canadian community, there is a major obstacle to women getting help because you're not supposed to talk about your family issues with a stranger. But how can you get help if you don't?” Sonia says.

She has seen first-hand the courage a woman has to summon up to leave an abuser. Sometimes, it's easier to find the courage when desperation and fear are there too. This was the case of one young Indo-Canadian woman whom Sonia helped in her early years of working with immigrant women in Edmonton (Sonia later moved to the Lower Mainland and has continued counselling women here).

The young woman had married her husband in India in an arranged marriage that neither of them wanted and that was forced on them by their parents. The husband wanted to marry his girlfriend and so brought anger and resentment to the union. They were also divided by their interests and life ambitions. The young wife had studied dentistry in India and wanted to continue on that career path, while the husband was a truck driver.

The physical abuse started early in their married life. When the young woman found herself pregnant, a deep fear set in and she knew she had to get away. She fled to Alberta to have her baby, staying with family friends. There, she met Sonia, who got her help through the provincial social services department so she had money for rent and food. Sonia also made an appeal to the Indo-Canadian community in that city, through a radio program, and the community responded with clothes, furnishings and diapers for a year.

Sonia then encouraged the young woman to think of her future and a career. She took her to the University of Alberta and told her she could apply for a student loan. Her mother came from India to look after the baby and she finished her degree in dentistry. Eventually, she moved to Toronto to practise dentistry, since Vancouver and her husband still felt too close for comfort.

What kind of man abuses a woman to the point where she has to put 3,000 kilometres between them to feel safe? That man can also be someone who appears to be a respectable professional.

He was a lawyer who slept in the bed and ordered his wife, a university graduate, to sleep on the floor. In the winter – and this was Edmonton – he demanded that she sleep in the garage.

Eventually, the woman broke out of the private prison that every abuser constructs for a victim and told her neighbour, whose son was a police officer. He called Sonia, who arranged a secret meeting with the woman and advised her of her choices: stay in the relationship but know that the abuse will only get worse; or leave the relationship and begin to live again. A plan was put in place for her to leave.

As they were Muslim, her husband claimed he had divorced her because he had declared it three times. Sonia advised the woman she still needed a divorce under Canadian law. She got the divorce and went on to earn a Masters of History and lead a much happier life.

It might seem that telling someone your spouse is beating you up is a “no-brainer”. But for many women, especially those from certain ethnic communities, it's far from simple.

In the Indo-Canadian community, for example, abuse is never talked about within families – the subject is taboo. At the core of this is a defined view of marriage: “In the community you're brought up thinking once you're married, you're married for life – no matter what your husband does - until you dead body comes out of that house,” says Sonia.

Even if parents know their daughter is being abused, she adds, they will not interfere - it's between husband and wife. “A woman knows that if she tells her parents, nothing will be done.”

Trapped and alone with their abusers, many women's families only come to their assistance when they end up in hospital because of injuries from the abuse.

That happened to a woman Sonia knew in the Lower Mainland. A mother of three young children and a successful business woman, she took a job that obliged her to travel and be away from her family one or two months at a time.

How could she leave her three young children? Sonia's finely tuned radar sensed something was deeply wrong. It was only when the woman ended up in the emergency ward after her husband threw her down the stairs that she broke her silence – he had been abusing her for 25 years.

To see what she has seen, and to realize the majority of women stay in abusive marriages, how could Sonia not be deeply pessimistic about so many women and their lives? Where is the hope?

“The younger generation is less likely to tolerate abuse,” she says, adding that she knows of young Indo-Canadian women who have refused to put up with abuse and have left arranged marriages.

There is still much to do, but Sonia believes more and more women now know that there are community resources, including individuals like her, who can extend a caring hand to a woman.

“Even if one woman comes out of an abusive situation, it's great because it's a gain,”

“Tell Some One”
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Article Sponsered by South Fraser Family Court & Youth Justice Committee. All names of individuals and places in this story are fictitious. Any resemblance with an actual person or incident is purely coincidental and neither the writer nor the Miracle is responsible for it.