HOUSTON – It’s not exactly a secret that communities of color don’t talk enough about mental health or abuse. More conversations are being had to break the pattern, but it can sometimes feel—at least generationally—like people are still oblivious. When Galib Chowdhury was fired from the Houston Police Department and was given a prison sentence for shooting his wife in the face and hand, it proved though, that people were in fact, listening.
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Back in June 2023, Chowdhury was on the other side of a jail cell after shooting his wife, Sadaf Iqbal, at their northwest Houston apartment on Clay Road. He told police he shot at someone who was breaking into their apartment and Iqbal “got in the way.” But while medical staff treated her injuries, she confessed that “it was not an accident.”
Text messages she shared from Chowdhury with investigators that corroborated her statement which included:
between Chowdhury and his wife, he allegedly sent his wife before the shooting:
“Wow, sh*t wife.”
“Pick up, b****.”
“I need to know ETA.”
For nonprofit groups like Daya, which helps abuse survivors of South Asian descent, Iqbal’s situation told an even more frightening story. Here you have a case about domestic violence—a topic rarely (if at all) discussed in the South Asian community— and any thought about involving police is often quickly shut down. Now considering that the abuse was committed by a law enforcement official, who does one turn to for help?
“There’s also this sense of loyalty a lot of times that people have even towards their harm-doers, towards their abusers If that person is your husband, your partner, someone that you really, really love and care for, you may trust them despite being harmed by them,“ Hareema Mela, Director of Client Services at Daya Houston tells me. “It’s a really complicated relationship dynamic, especially in the South Asian community. There’s a burden on the woman to keep the family together to compromise and to try to fix it.
“So she may have (in that moment) felt not just fear to have her go along with his story, but loyalty, shame, a sense of responsibility to keep the families together and to honor her family and her husband,” she added. “So these are the common dynamics that we see in South Asian culture in particular, along with the mistrust of authorities and systems and a fear of talking to the police, not knowing what’s going to happen."
As part of our “Breaking Free” series, we have shared dozens of resources residents in abuse situations can turn to for help.
MORE: Houston Area Women’s Center expands services, shelter capacity amid rising demand for domestic violence support | ‘Choose a new life:’ How domestic violence victims can find help
Houston continues to see a rise in domestic violence-related homicides.
“People do fall off the wagon all the time because, in our field, there’s something called the stages of change," Mela explained. "So people can initially be in like a pre-contemplative or a contemplative stage of change where they’re just now starting to think, ‘Maybe this isn’t right,’ ‘Maybe I should do something,’ all the way to planning, action, and maintenance where they do make changes and they stick with them. So we see that people can be anywhere on that continuum of stages of changes. and we meet them where they are in terms of like, if they’re in a really pre-contemplative or contemplative stage, we wouldn’t push too hard. We would always put the onus on them to tell us what their goals are, what their plans are. And we let them be in that expert role instead of us, because each person is the expert on their own relationship."
In Iqbal’s case, seeing it through to the end showed justice prevailed in the end. Despite Galib Chowdhury being a police officer, when he hurt her, his termination from HPD and 20-year prison sentence showed no one—not even he—is above the law. It can seem like the conversations we’ve had about domestic violence and the awareness raised in the South Asian community are (no pun intended) all talk, but they were certainly not in vain.
“Talking is part of the action,” Mela reminded. "Because the culture of silence is how domestic violence can thrive under the radar...And the greatest amount of talking that could benefit is from people in positions of power. So religious leaders or community leaders, people that have more sway and influence in public spheres, if they’re the ones speaking out about this, it’s going to trickle down a lot further."
Now go spread the word.
If you or someone you know needs help, there are resources available. We have a section on our website called Breaking Free dedicated to resources and support from the community.