Amna, a 26-year-old mother of three, had to rebuild her life entirely when her husband drove her out of their home after a traumatic divorce. In an effort to piece her life together, she had to single-handedly look for a home, change her children’s school as she could no longer afford the previous one and, more than anything else, put food on the table. She approached the court for alimony and maintenance of her children but even after five years, her case remains pending.

Amna is certainly not the only one. In the strictly patriarchal Pakistani society, women are hit hardest and fall into poverty when families breakdown. The minimum age of marriage for Pakistani women falls loosely between 16 to 18 years where they hardly manage to complete high-school. With the divorce rate going up by approximately 10pc every year, according to advocate Omar Sial, an increasing number of women are at risk of social and economic malfunction since they don’t even meet the basic qualifications for even the most primary jobs.

Women no longer ready to compromise

Divorce for Pakistani women remains a choice between poverty and a miserable married life

A research report titled Surge of Divorce in Muslim World, by Dr Hafiza Shahida Parveen, based on the rising divorce rate in Pakistan, holds that socio-economic independence of women is the most important reason for the soaring divorce rates. “When women earn themselves, husbands mostly do not care for their maintenance responsibility; in this way conflict arises. Sometimes earning women do not pay due respect to their husbands,” the report says.

Liberalists, such as Advocate Badar Alam, believe it to be the only redeeming factor that saves women from living in vindictive and tormenting marriages. “One of the primary reasons why women stay in torturous marriages is because they can’t support themselves if their marriage falls apart,” says Badar Alam.

Years in marriage equals no rights for women                         

For a divorcee mother, severe financial penalties await. To begin with, there’s no law that obligates a man to support his wife after years of marriage end in a divorce.

Rabia, a mother of three was divorced after 10 years of marriage and received no more than Rs25,000 as deferred dower, which is hardly 1pc of her husband’s annual earnings. However, since the law does not make him liable to pay anything to his wife on the instance of divorce, Rabia had to walk away with the meagre dower amount after dedicating a decade of her life to the marriage.

“In European countries, women receive a share of the husband’s money and property upon divorce. The amount keeps increasing with the number of years spent married, other conditions applied. In Pakistan, however, there’s no such law that entitles a woman for any share in her husband’s money in the case of divorce, unless and until specified in the contract of marriage,” asserts Sial.

“In European countries, women receive a share of the husband’s money and property upon divorce. The amount keeps increasing with the number of years spent married, other conditions applied. In Pakistan, however, there’s no such law that entitles a woman for any share in her husband’s money in the case of divorce, unless and until specified in the contract of marriage.”

Asking for divorce is a worse crime

Pakistani laws get even more bigoted in cases where a woman files for divorce, as she has to forego even that meagre dower. Hence, there’s no set law for deciding alimony in Pakistan, which is given solely on an arbitrary basis. It entirely depends on the judge’s discretion which is often governed by a misogynistic moral system.

According to Sial, only 20pc of divorce appeals make it to the court every year for many reasons — the most important one being courtroom harassment and character slandering of the appellant woman. He says, “Common accusations made against women are adultery and a negligent attitude towards children which even puts the custody of the children at stake, let alone win her a sum as settlement.”

Divorce leaves children worse off

However, it’s not just the women at the burning end of the candle; divorce also leaves children worse off. These ‘nuclear’ households experience large drops in living as loss of the man’s earnings is in no way compensated for by higher income from alimony, child maintenance, and having fewer mouths to feed. Women are usually left struggling to pay essential bills and put food on the table for children, while men are better off without being responsible for any household liabilities.

What is most surprising is that there’s no set formula for calculating child maintenance. It varies from one judge to another, but certainly no good sums or even a reasonable amount of money is ever seen to be fixed by the court. This is mostly because most men easily manage to hide their earnings and women have simply no way to prove it.

It’s not just the women at the burning end of the candle; divorce also leaves children worse off. These ‘nuclear’ households experience large drops in living as the loss of the man’s earnings is in no way compensated for by higher income from alimony or child maintenance.

Alia, recently divorced after eight years of marriage with four children in their growing stages, was only allocated Rs4,000 per child by the court. This is unreasonable since the school fees of each child is Rs6,000 besides the other costs associated with school, children’s living expenses, travel costs, clothing and a rented house. If Alia weren’t financially supported by her parents, she and her children would be left high and dry in the face of a painful divorce.

Which is a greater evil: poverty or misery?

Surprisingly, these amounts remain fixed for years and are not affected by inflation and the depreciating value of the rupee at all. Logically, the purchasing power of Rs2,500 has changed drastically over 10 years in Pakistan but Nasreen received the same amount until her daughters’ wedding, that too not regularly and after every six months.

In most of these cases, the father also stops paying for maintenance after a few months and also stops responding to the court’s notices. No lawyers interviewed ever witnessed a man being jailed or punished for refusing to pay for child care.

This becomes one of the primary reasons why women in Pakistan choose to hide their sufferings behind closed doors. The lack of financial backup is one reason why women are never able to walk out of torturous marriages. Essentially, it’s about choosing the lesser evil — socio-economic adversity or an agonising marriage. Most of them choose the latter.

According to advocate Tahera Hasan, the affliction is due more to cultural factors than legal. “In the nikahnama (Islamic marriage contract), which is basically a contract you could add anything to as a condition for marriage, there’s a clause for everything including property, alimony, dowry, daily expenses and even a woman’s right to divorce. The problem is with the societal mindset that shies from admitting the need to discuss these matters which are overlooked and considered in bad taste at the time of marriage,” she explained.

However, the government and the justice system take no interest in ensuring that a woman’s basic rights are protected no matter what primal agreements have been made at the time of marriage. As a result, with the rise in the number of divorces in Pakistani society, women and children are once again abject victim of societal cruelty and discrimination. Sooner or later, Amna will have to choose between poverty and misery, between giving up her children to foster homes or marrying another man solely to support herself and her children with no absolute guarantees or commitments whatsoever.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, January 10th, 2016