Women’s Aid Organisation was founded to plug a gap in the services available for battered women and their children in Malaysia.

“WAO started in the early 1980s with a pro-tem committee that used to meet in Port Dickson. At that time, there were no services for battered women and their children, and no laws that criminalised domestic violence in Malaysia. The idea was to establish an organisation that was able to plug that gap,” says WAO executive director Sumitra Visvanathan.