Malaysia

During my time here in Malaysia I've been working for Women's Aid Organisation. In the past this has involved going to meetings, organizing file cabinets, writing letters, and whatever else they could give me to do, but I've finally received my "big project". WAO tries to give their office interns a self-directed project that will be useful to the organization in some way, and because I am working at WAO for class credit, my project also correlates with my course requirement making it a neat two-in-one.
My project is to look comprehensively at the way the Malaysian police force responds to domestic violence situations and the way they protect domestic violence survivors. WAO has had issues with the police in past concerning the safety of domestic violence survivors and there are problems that need to be identified and addressed so I will be starting a discussion about what is not working and how things can be changed. My Global Studies Project will be dealing with the same problem and I've already begun interviews with a few of WAO's social workers to discuss their experiences with the police and domestic violence. They've been very interesting so far. I anticipated discussing the cultural attitude toward domestic violence in Malaysia and how that effects the way the police deal with domestic violence situations, but I did not anticipate looking so deeply into the Domestic Violence Act and the Penal Code to look at the law structure and how it's preventing women from receiving adequate protection. I won't get into the details here, but if you're interested send me an email or ask me about it when I get home. I should be pretty well-versed in the subject by then, and it's really interesting stuff. And if anyone knows a police officer in the US that works in domestic violence response or prevention, let me know! I'd love to get some insight into a police system in another country that's responding to domestic violence in a different way.

Note: This post was originally entitled "Workin' 9 to 5" but after that song became firmly stuck in my head I decided I wouldn't do that to you nice people.