Saudi Man Gets10 Years Jail Term, 3600 lashes for Torturing Wife

One fifth of marriages in Saudi Arabia end up in Divorce!

DUBAI - 29 April 2003 - A court in Baha, Saudi Arabia has sentenced a man, suspected to be a drug addict, to 10 years in prison and 3,600 lashes, some of them to be administered in public, for torturing his wife The wife lost her sight and hearing in addition to sustaining serious injuries all over her body because the husband emptied boiling water over her head, burned her with a heated piece of metal and used a vacuum cleaner to drown out her screams. The Saudi courts grant between twenty-five and thirty-five divorces a day, with most occurring in the first three years of marriage. Most divorced women had married under the age of twenty, say recent reports.

A report in Al-Jadeeda Arabic magazine said the accused husband belongs to a respectable family and worked in a government job. Mistreating spouses is a common crime in Saudi Arabia where the number of divorce cases has been increasing. "My sister seemed happy with him at first, especially after she had her first baby. But then she changed," said the brother of the woman. "She didn't visit us as often as she used to, and she always seemed sad when we came to see her." Said the victim's brother. One night she rang her family and said she could not live with her husband any more. However, she did not tell them her husband was beating her. "One day the family received a phone call from my brother-in-law's family saying my sister was dead. We were very sad when we went to her house and remembered the phone calls she made. What if it was true that her husband had treated her badly?" The man's family insisted on having the accused punished for torturing the woman. Now he is very sad and regrets everything he did, and he is also being treated for his drugs problem," a relative told Al-Jadeeda. The wife is entitled to a divorce in this case because her husband poses a clear danger to her," the judge said.

Nearly one-fifth marriages in Saudi Arabia end up in divorces. While about 81,576 marriages were registered in one year, the Shariat courts settled 16,725 divorce cases during the same period. Fifty five per cent divorces were attributed to polygamy. Most divorces occurred within three years of marriage and the divorced women were married at less than 20 years of age. Polygamy is responsible for up to 55 percent of divorces in the conservative kingdom, where the practice is legal and common.

The number of unmarried Saudi women will exceed four million by the year 2007, predicts Prof. Abdullah Al-Fuzan of the Riyadh-based King Saud University (KSU). According to the sociologist, there are 1.5 million unmarried Saudi women due to growing divorce rate among the Saudi couples, within three years of their pre-arranged marriage.According to his studies huge number of divorces take place in the Kingdom. More than 18,000 marriages out of a total 60,000 solemnized in different parts of the Kingdom during 2001 have already ended in divorce, media reports say. According to study conducted by Al-Saif, the Islamic courts have been approving 25 to 35 divorce cases every day in the country. Most of the divorces occur in the first three years of marriage and a majority of divorced women had married under the age of 20.

According to S Mohammad Al-Saif, a Saudi sociologist polygamy is responsible for 55 percent of the divorces reported. A vast difference in age is also causing divorce. A total of 16,725 weddings out of 81,576 ended in divorce between March 2000 and March 2001 --20.5 percent of all marriages. Dr. Ebtisan Halawani of the Jeddah-based King Abdul Aziz University surveyed 158 Saudi divorcees. The main causes of breaking away for women from their husbands were ill-treatment, violence and hot temper", reported Arab News quoting the sociologist. The report said, some of them revealed to the researcher that their separation was the result of the non-committal attitudes of their husbands toward meeting family’s financial needs.

About 38 percent of the divorcees said that the involvement of their husbands in illicit relationships led to broken marriages. IIn one case a woman was locked up by her husband in a hotel room and he left the country, leading to their separation, Arab News report said. This sociological problem, attributed to the growing influence of individualism and lesser influence of religioun on family life. The UAE and some of the other Gulf countries too face the same problem of divorces.