Will You Give This Up Over One Slap? – Blood Sisters

 

I recently finished watching a Nollywood film called Blood Sisters, which centred around two best friends who ended up running from the law because they killed the finance of one of them, who happened to be abusing her.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9sSydb5ec8

 

 The key driver in the story is the fact that the abusive finance is from a powerful family – powerful enough to tell the police what the conclusion of their investigation should be and they know that if the matriarch of the family chooses to make them disappear, the police would happily oblige. The power of this family is such that when the girl who is being abused tells her mother that she can’t go through the marriage because the guy has been hitting her, the mother proceeds to tell her not to be selfish because her father’s business depends on the man’s family and the fact remains, the girl will be “taken care off” in the material sense. Her mother’s line is “will you give all this up over one slap.”

If you look at this incident in this Nollywood series, you’ll realise that the human being has an incredible ability to tolerate abuse if he or she believes that there’s a material benefit and the line “All this over one slap” can applied to anything. In Singapore, this problem is most commonly found in the are of migrant labour. Every justification for mistreating migrant workers works along of the line that whatever we’re doing (unsafe transportation, unsanitary living conditions etc) are just “one slap” and the jobs that the migrant workers do and the salaries they are paid is the “all of this” in the equation.

Generally speaking, the argument covers a lot of things. Migrant workers do put up with their lot in life because they are getting “all of this,” and are not going to complain about “one-slap.” Since nobody complains, everyone assumes that the situation is not abuse.

However, what nobody seems to understand is the fact that just because nobody complains about a situation, it doesn’t mean that the situation is alright. In the show, the situation starts when the girl tells her finance that she won’t marry him because her best friend has the made the point to her that if she forgives her finance for “one-slap” it will be a lifetime of slaps for her.

The question is inevitably where does the line get drawn and in the case of “abusive” behaviour, it usually doesn’t stop at “one-slap,” and it’s been found that if wounds from abuse are left untreated, they inevitably fester and the problem ends up worse. Take the issue of unsanitary conditions in the worker dormitories as an example. The unsanitary conditions in the dorms are the proverbial “one-slap” that the workers put up with because they are getting “all of this” in return. Since nobody complains, nobody deals with the underlying problem. When Covid hit, the dormitories proved to be breeding grounds for the disease and the government has struggled to get the situation under control (so much so that the Minister of Manpower still won’t enter a dormitory unless he’s in a hazmat suite).

We need to find a way of understanding that issues don’t go away because nobody complains. We need to understand that when people complain, they are doing us a service by pointing out that underlying issues exist and need to be addressed. Changing the culture that listens to criticisms is not rocking the boat but ensuring things constantly improve.