Help

Seeing domestic abuse happen on the streets of Hong Kong makes me ill.  I'd heard from others who've seen couples fighting or yelling or seeing a guy hit the girl and sadly, I finally witnessed it too.  What sucks is that it's one of those situations where you want to help, but you can't...or you can (because in reality, you always can in whatever way possible) and it doesn't help.

We watched the World Cup final in LKF at a bar near 7-Eleven where they didn't have cover (yay!) and in the end, they didn't make us pay for 2 drinks (just one and the manager/owner/whoever even decided to give us more drinks later on tehehe).  We all rooted for the Netherlands because Francis, who moved into PM a few weeks ago, is Dutch and none of us had any ties to Spain...and well, none of us are extremely avid fans of soccer...err football (though it is fun to watch).  Unfortunately, Spain won and we left to find a taxi as everyone, but me had to work the next day today.  Of course, considering everyone else in LKF needed a taxi as well, we couldn't find one.

On our way down, we saw a girl struggling in the arms of a guy--so much that eventually she was grasping onto his shirt to get him away and the shirt ripped apart.  We continued staring at them from across the crosswalk and weren't sure what to do...call the police??  He was holding on to her and wouldn't let her go no matter what she did.  If I was a superhero, I would've swooped right in to save her, but alas, I don't live in a movie.  By the time we decided to call the police, they were too far away.

While we walked around Central, we came across them again in line at a bus stop and she was still struggling.  He had his arm around her neck, practically choking her, and was pushing her face while cussing at her in Canto.  No one around them did anything, so being the brave one, Lizzy went up to him and told him to let go of her and that we'd call the police.  He proceeded to reply, "Mind your own fucking business," and everyone continued to stare.  Nothing happened, so we continued walking down (feeling helpless, though I can't imagine what the girl felt) and turned the corner only to bump into a policeman (yay, what we were looking for).  We told him briefly about the situation and to look for this shirtless guy, but when he left us we saw that he didn't stop to look for him at all.  I think he probably didn't even care.

All I hope for, is that the girl is ok and that nothing worse happened later on, but that's only hoping.  I also hope that soon she'll realize what kind of relationship she's in and will get out of it, but that's also only hoping as it's an extremely difficult cycle to get out of.  This situation reminds me of what we'd discuss in our Vagina Monologues rehearsals considering the main purpose of the show is to address violence against women.  This shit happens all the time, but no one ever talks about it, so I decided I'd talk a bit about it now...

If you were in our situation, seeing it happen, what would you do?