By Aileen Qaiser
The situation came to a point where I was contemplating suicide," cried Samina, who lives alone with her seven-year-old daughter in Islamabad. These words sum up the mental anguish that some women who live alone go through and the desperation that they are driven to.
Divorced two years ago, 39-year-old Samina and her young daughter Moomna are constantly harassed by neighbours. Living in a modest second floor apartment in the heart of the capital, Samina has had to put up with verbal abuse and threats from neighbours in the hallways, and the neighbourhood children throwing rocks and bottles at her daughter whenever she goes downstairs to play. Practically every day Samina discovers a new dent on her car and every morning or the other, she finds a flat tyre.
As if the harassment at home is not enough, Samina has had to fight constant battles to keep her job, to retain the roof over her head, to prevent her daughter from being thrown out of school and to fend off arrests by the police. All these problems originated from written complaints by her neighbours to her work place, the housing office, her daughter’s school and the police respectively. Little wonder she feels like committing suicide.
Divorced women like Samina are generally more harassed than widows living alone because the prevailing social and cultural stigma attached to divorce is such that she is usually ostracized by the community and in many cases experiences extreme isolation. It is common for divorced women living alone like Samina to be accused of immoral behaviour.
In Samina’s case, the harassment also has something to do with the fact that she is residing in an official accommodation which is in popular demand because of the general shortage of such accommodation for government officers and employees.
Last month, the thin and frail Samina was manhandled by two hefty neighbourhood housewives when she tried to speak to them about their children taunting Moomna for being an illegitimate child. A one-inch scar below Samina’s left eye now serves to remind her of the physical assault by her neighbours.
Samina tried to seek the protection of the police by filing a report about the neighbours’ assault, but was instead accused of stealing from the neighbourhood women and was almost arrested.
The physical attack on her mother has scarred Moomna emotionally. The little girl had cried frantically, “Mama, they’re going to kill you” when the neighbours pounced on her mother. Now Moomna often screams repeatedly at night in her sleep, “I want to kill you!”
Whenever there is a knock at the door, Moomna gets frightened and runs to the bathroom to hide. She thinks it is either the police who have come to take them away or the “aunties” from downstairs who have come to try and kill her mother again.
Although the state runs a Working Women’s Hostel in the capital for working women who live alone, Samina does not qualify to live there because she has a child with her. She has been trying hard to get a transfer to another accommodation in a different locality but neither her superiors nor the housing office has been able to help her.
On the other hand, 55-year-old Kausar is unmarried and is entitled to live in the Working Women’s Hostel. But the salary that she earns as a low-grade employee is too meagre for her to afford the hostel fees.
The behaviour of the government employees’ housing neighbourhood, where Kausar has been living for over 20 years, has been long on hostility and short on kindness and sympathy. She has had excrement smeared on her door and neighbourhood children throwing bricks and rocks into her courtyard. When she walks in the street, children chant insults and jeer at her, and even try to pull away her chaddar.
She has never complained to the police about her neighbours’ abuse, as she fears that she would herself be arrested and investigated for making such a complaint, if not jailed and attacked.
In a society where having “connections” or close relatives in important official positions matter a great deal, particularly as a means of respect and protection. Women who lack these, like Kausar and Samina, become vulnerable to all kinds of bullying by society.
Then there is 44-year-old Rukhsana, a divorcee who was terminated because she could not return in time to rejoin her job after taking leave to go to Karachi to sort out problems with her husband. Her main worry has been how to get a job and pay her bills. While struggling to retain her flat until a decision was made about her reinstatement in service or otherwise, she sold off her major possessions one by one, beginning with jewelry, furniture, television and then the refrigerator, so that she and her son could have two square meals a day.
In the heat of summer this year, when the electricity connection was cut off from their third floor apartment,she used to sit up all through the hot nights fanning her son so that he could sleep as she couldn’t pay the bill. For the past two months now, Rukhsana has hit a financial downslide; the mother and son went hungry for several days until a kind friend or considerate acquaintance would offer them a meal.
The hearing of the case of Rukhsana’s reinstatement in service is coming up in a month’s time. If the decision goes against her, she and her son will be thrown out into the streets.
The extended family has traditionally looked after women who are either unmarried, widowed or divorced. But now this no longer provides automatic support, as the experiences of Samina, Kausar and Rukhsana prove. Social, economic and cultural changes, have all collectively made it difficult for extended families to afford anymore people than the immediate family itself (see box).
It is however, important for women living alone to retain kinship contacts, as many do, that also provides them a form a protection from such wrath of society. Despite the apparent progress in empowering women in Pakistan in recent years, traditional social mores regarding women have not changed much. There still remains a strong social taboo against women living alone without a male head of household.
Until and unless the state is able to provide greater protection and security to women living alone, the extended family is still the best bet for their social protection and financial security. But what about women like Samina, Kausar and Rukhsana whose family members are mostly abroad or in other cities? To whom should they turn to for protection and security?
