there is one point that all of you have overlooked in the discussion, having been in an abusive marriage myself the foremost reason i have always been very reluctant to divorce him is that I think its very difficult to survive in pakistan without a man by your side.
i grew up without a father (he passed away when i was quite young) so i have had some very painful experiences in this regard even though my mother is a very strong lady MashAllah and she tried to protect me as best as could and we also had some family around but even then… i wont go in the details but suffice it to say they were quite traumatic… so even though i am separated i am very reluctant to go ahead with the divorce because i don’t want my daughter to go through all that…
i read somewhere ," baap ke marnay ke bad aap aik aisay ghar main muntaqil ho jaaty hain jis ka main gate toota hua he" i think its very true
as far as comparing with the west they are on the other extreme… on all trillion of the domestic abuse help websites i have visited divorce is listed as the only option, “once an abuser, always an abuser” while that might be true for some of the cases it not true for everyone…while discussing my own problem with a close friend at work, she told me that when she was little her father used to hit her mother,her younger two sis were were too young but she and her older brother witnessed it, but it stopped eventually… all of them are grown up and married now… all happy in their married lives, she is a balanced happy person, i know her bhai and bhabi too, they are a very happy couple too MA…
someone else i know also suffered from it very early in their marriage before they had kids, but there were just one or two incidents and it stopped too, they have a daughter now and things are quite good if not perfect,
what i want to say is, even in cases as extreme as physical abuse don’t follow blindly what the west say and don’t rush divorce… the same family and inlaws that seem like a nuisance otherwise can prove to be good support system and may even help turn things around by pressurising the husband to ‘behave’. that’s what made it work in one of the above 2 cases…
divorce is never a solution, its just trading one set of problems for the other, so unless one is financially and socially very secure, in pakistan divorced women are just an easy target for the whole society to exploit
just my 2 cents