MUMBAI: Former Bollywood actress Somy Ali is far from the glitz and glamour of the industry but is still making headlines for her heroic work with her NGO No More Tears (NMT). While she is busy saving the victims of abuse and trafficking, she will soon be training the police personnel in Florida to better understand and help the victims. She had earlier held similar workshops when NMT was initiated in 2007, but stopped because she got swamped with victims work.
She is back again and this time she wants to cover many Police Departments in the U.S. with Tampa and Orlando in July. She has now been invited to train officers from both the Orlando and Tampa Police Departments on how to handle domestic violence and human trafficking cases involving South Asian and Hispanic communities, the groups often misunderstood, overlooked, or silenced in the traditional justice system.
In the past two decades, Somy, with her NGO, has rescued and assisted over 50,000 victims of abuse and violence, and from her experience, she can share that a woman can be from Karachi, Medellín, or Mumbai, but she is often made to not speak up against abuse and violence as it will bring shame to the family and is fed that any help would need money and can cost them everything—family, children, safety, even life itself.
In her training sessions, Somy is planning to break it down for the officers to read the untold stories of these women. She said, “If a woman doesn’t speak, it doesn’t mean she’s lying. It means she’s terrified—of the abuser, of the stigma, of being banished by her own community.”
She aims to educate the officers on how abusers exploit culture by banning English to keep victims isolated, using immigration status to control them, and framing police intervention as a betrayal of family honor. Her training will push for the use of a certified translator, someone who is not a family member; recognizing emotional abuse that doesn’t leave bruises; understanding how deeply cultural guilt can silence a victim; and building trust, not just gathering evidence.
As Somy prepares to step into this new role this July, she plans to share real experiences and real pain and not just slides or statistics. She hopes that her voice reaches across borders and the victims are heard and get justice. She stressed that justice is not just about punishing the abuser but understanding the victim before their pain becomes permanent.
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