December 2, 2001

Girls and their families primarily look for security in marriage. Parents want a prospective son-in-law to secure their daughter’s future and in a patriarchal society, offer her the protection his name automatically confers on her.

Marriage is an implicit deal between any girl’s parents and her prospective husband. Parents protect her from the evil influences of the outside world and rationalize her freedom in accordance with their socio-economic values.

The son-in-law, in exchange, identifies his honour with her person and provides for her and their children. But things don’t always turn out that way.

Nigar and Zareen are attractive women in their early thirties. During their adolescent years, their activities were confined to their homes to safeguard their honour and prepare them for marital life.

Nigar’s mother married off her widowed daughter to her nephew, believing he would support her and bring up her minor son like his own. After eight years and four daughters, he threw all of them out of the house.

Near starvation, Nigar jumped in the Rawal Dam along with her five children. She now wishes they had never been rescued.

Zareen’s husband and her in-laws abused her for seven years. Persuaded by his mother that the child his wife was pregnant with wasn’t his, Nasir, a drug addict, forced Zareen to have an abortion. For the one time she resisted her brother-in-law, she was sent back home to her parents.

Nigar and Zareen have no alternative support system to fall back on. They don’t qualify for Zakat because their husbands are earning and their name, far from conferring any protection, is threatening their very survival. Nigar’s widowed mother and Zareen and her chronically-ill father slave to put food on the table.

The concept of the male breadwinner is so deeply entrenched in our cultural values that education and jobs for women are merely considered pastimes till they can take on their responsibilities as wives and mothers.

But there is a parallel, not-so-explicit reason for denying education and/or employment opportunities to women. Women are often deliberately prevented from gaining awareness about their rights and acquiring marketable skills to ensure their dependence on men and to confine them to passive roles.

This limits their chances of surviving independently, thus aborting any challenge to the male authority in their lives.

Farah is a Grade-17 government officer. Her colleague, Abid, fell for her and ten years ago, when she was 26, they got married. Before the first year was over, Farah was footing all the bills. Her sisters-in-law had convinced Abid that Farah should be made to pay for her independence. They claimed she wouldn’t quit her job because she enjoyed male company.

Violence followed verbal abuse and one night Abid walked out never to return again. A mother of two daughters, Farah was more relieved than heartbroken; five years of abuse was all she could take.

According to Fauzia, a psychiatrist who works exclusively for the social empowerment of women, sustained and extremely violent physical abuse breaks the wife’s spirit and forces her to reevaluate her circumstances, but few women ask for legal advice.

“A woman is like a wall,” says Nigar’s mother, “it takes a lot for her to cry out.”

Depending upon her perception of her rights, the wife might decide to seek help if driven to extremes. Zareen drew the line when her husband sided with his brother though she had only acted in self-defence. She refuses to go back to him despite threats to her life.

“Domestic violence is too narrowly defined in our society,” says Fauzia. “Violence is multi-faceted and encompasses physical, psychological and economic abuse. But women are seldom aware of this.”

However, economic empowerment of women and awareness about different forms of domestic violence they suffer from as wives and daughters is not enough to help secure their rights.

For every wife who goes to court, there are thousands who never reveal themselves. Social pressures stifle their voices.

Every woman who fights for her rights knows she risks censure. If her private misery becomes public, her husband’s indifference will only make her more vulnerable and society targets the weak. Blame is automatically attached to the woman and her character comes under assault.

“Statements such as ‘she was too liberal’ or ‘she provoked her husband’ absolve the man of all guilt, branding the wife responsible for the blow to family prestige because she is the one who is talked about,” explained an abused wife.

There is a dual social control system in place to quench any rebellion by men and women directed at patriarchy: society and the law.

Nargis and Zareen have filed for maintenance allowance because for them it is a question of survival. And Farah feels her husband can’t forget her as long as he is made to provide for her. Abandoned by their husbands, these women have nothing to lose.

Even though Abid produced a fake divorce certificate in court, Farah refuted his claim and won the case for maintenance allowance, since she had not received her copy from the Union Council.

Nargis and Zareen have no such assurance. Their husbands are employed in the informal sector of the economy and there is no monthly proof of their income.

Now that they have filed for execution of the court’s orders on maintenance allowance, bailiffs claim their husbands cannot be traced. There are no penalties in place for their defaulter husbands or corrupt bailiffs who team up with them.

None of these women approached the police. An abused wife is at the mercy of the judicial system. She needs someone to pick up the pieces for her and make her whole again. But the police offer their own brand of advice that have more to do with socialization than the law.

In the first place, in case of domestic violence, the officer on duty refuses to register an FIR, specially if the accused is in the police. Physical violence against wives is not a crime, till the wife specifically mentions death threats.

If a woman asks for protection from her parents or husband or seeks separation or even divorce from the latter, the police refuse to provide assistance, waving away the matter as a family affair.

This is despite the fact that registration of an FIR is guaranteed by law. A woman has every right to ask for protection if she feels her basic rights are being violated.

The attitude of the police towards the victim is derogatory and accusing. “If a woman wants to register a complaint against abuse,” said Ayesha, a psychologist involved in sensitizing the police about gender issues, “they assume she must have provoked her abuser in some way. They believe that if she had remained silent and submissive she could have stayed her husband’s hand,” she added.

Women police stations were set up to facilitate women in reporting crime. “But women police officers have been socialized with the same attitudes,” said Amina, also a psychologist.

Refusing battered wives any alternative, the police usually advise them to bow before fate and refrain from “disrupting family life”, proving little better than their male colleagues, she said.

Victims of domestic abuse learn to keep silent. The woman’s humiliation is particularly intense if the abuser is her husband. Sometimes, even the family and close friends are unaware of her predicament. Azmat got her Masters degree in the 1960s. Her marriage was arranged but she was her husband’s choice. An executive with an international company, she worked from nine to five to be able to afford the kind of lifestyle her millionaire in-laws could relate to, while Nasir, her husband, squandered his inheritance on his pastimes.

She can still vividly recall the terror Nasir created at home for over 25 years. The accusations he levelled at Azmat would be censored in print.

One day, after her retirement, Nasir announced that he was leaving Islamabad. Azmat and her daughter had ten days to make alternative arrangements for a house and all subsequent expenditures.

“Social penalties would boomerang on me, my daughter and my parents if I were to raise my voice,” said Azmat. She is left to uphold the prestige of the family name.

Azmat’s passive acceptance of domestic violence stems from our value system. In a patriarchy, the legitimacy of a woman’s existence depends on her relationship with the head of the household and if she is married, her husband.

The wife thinks it’s natural for the husband to dictate to her because she believes men are by nature, dominant. As a little girl, she saw her mother obeying her father and giving her brother precedence over her and the stereotypical roles stuck in her mind.

Gender roles, however, are not defined by nature; they are constructed socially. Girls are socialized into submissive and subordinate roles while their brothers are encouraged to adopt aggressive attitudes in order to assert themselves.

Society provides no refuge for the wife who cannot make her home with her husband. The government’s shelter homes for women who want to get away from abusive situations first need to show written orders from the district magistrate.

Any woman who goes directly to the Dar-ul-Aman is first handed over to the police. If she cannot be turned back home, she is forced to spend the night in police lock-up till she can appear before the district magistrate.

“Once a woman enters the Dar-ul-Aman, there is no way out till the final decision of the court,” said Amina. While the plaintiff’s case is being processed, the onus of responsibility rests on her.

She herself has to prove the allegations she has levelled against her father or husband. She can’t even change her lawyer if she is not satisfied with his handling of the case.

The cultural mind-set is such that a woman who has left her house is looked upon with suspicion and contempt. This bias is already reflected in the attitudes of the agents involved in the legal process and often in the judges’ decisions. If the ruling is given against her, she is forcibly given in the custody of her guardians. The fact that she is a major and reserves the right to make her own decisions doesn’t count for much, specially if her husband is recognized as her legal guardian.

Decisions taken in favour of the plaintiff are often never implemented or there are time lags involved in execution of the court’s decree which prolong suffering and pressurize women for reconciliation.

“Additional expenditures involved in filing a suit for execution also deter women from seeking justice,” says Uzma, a Legal Aid Officer working with abused women.

Over the generations, women have been made so vulnerable that the majority of abused wives in the sub-continent today, as in the past, prefer to live with their husbands rather than strike out on their own.

These women have lived through the myth that marriage secures a woman’s future. Yet, none of them ever considered a divorce. Whether it is out of respect for marriage vows or lack of alternatives, we will never know.

But parents who neglect to make their daughter self-sufficient are in fact gambling away her life. The only assurance for her future lies in the girl’s socio-economic empowerment.

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