Zoya Ahmed is 33 years old and is currently going through a difficult divorce process. She lives in Karachi, Pakistan. Her decision to end the marriage was met with hostility by her husband. He started filing false reports with the police, even inventing that she was having an extramarital affair, which is considered a criminal offense in this country.
"It was terrifying"
"It created a lot of hatred against me. I had to endure a lot of shame in court... our courts are full of men. The way everyone looked at me... it was terrifying," she says.
Zoya says one of the reasons she filed for divorce had to do with their sex life. Her husband constantly mocked her desire for intimacy and used it to humiliate her. He would tell her: "You want sex - now you're going to have it." In his fabricated accusations of extramarital affairs, he also named several of their mutual male friends, further isolating her from her circle of friends.
Divorce is highly stigmatized not only in Pakistan but across Asia. While divorce cases are on the rise in the region, such as in India, Pakistan and Indonesia, the consequences for women remain severe.
Financial insecurity and stress
In Pakistan, divorce is permitted under Islamic law, but married women who seek a divorce must in most cases give up their dowry to their husbands as compensation for the dissolution of the marriage.
A 34-year-old woman, who preferred to remain anonymous, said her attempt to obtain a divorce turned into a long legal battle after she discovered that a clause in her prenuptial agreement that allowed her to seek a divorce had been removed from the document. Even if women do manage to get a divorce, the emotional trauma for them is immense.
Naveen Notiar, a 40-year-old Pakistani woman now living in the UK, recalls that when her parents divorced, a long custody battle ensued. “It’s usually another way to make life difficult for a woman,” Notiar says.
A 2020 study of 427 divorced women from Pakistan’s Punjab province found that they often suffered from depression and other mental health issues, often as a result of financial insecurity and negative family attitudes. Some have said that the hardest part was not the separation itself, but the aftermath - especially the custody of the children.
Divorce is forbidden in the Philippines
The Philippines is among the countries in the world where divorce is illegal. The only legal way to end a marriage is through an annulment, which requires the woman to prove the man's cheating, mental health problems or impotence. This forces women to turn their personal stories into arguments in court.
Ana Santos is a Filipino journalist living in Berlin. She has been fighting for years to have her marriage annulled. "I am privileged to have been able to do it," she says, recognizing that not all women can afford to pay a lawyer for the expensive procedure.
Most women prefer to keep their separations informal because they cannot bear the emotional and financial burden of annulling their marriage, explains Filipino sociologist Athena Charane Presto.
Family honor versus individual choice
In countries like Pakistan and the Philippines, financial dependency is one of the main reasons women stay in failed marriages. Bela Nawaz, a Pakistani gender researcher, argues that patriarchy is not the only factor. "The difficulties are not only due to patriarchal culture, but also to the understanding of the family community," Nawaz says. "We exist as family units, not as individuals. And that makes it extremely difficult for women to make independent decisions.”
This mindset forces women to put family honor above their personal well-being, she says. Those who end their marriages are often stigmatized as selfish and immoral, and are excluded from their family communities and support systems. Experts say that even if legal reforms are implemented, real equality is unlikely to be achieved if there is no progress in cultural attitudes and economic opportunities for women. In many parts of Asia, a woman’s decision to seek an end to her marriage is still considered a very radical act.
Author: Kaukab Shayrani