Acquitted Pakistani Woman’s Plight: Living in a Shelter Because She Can’t Live Alone
Naheed Arshad, a Pakistani woman, says she has been unfairly accused of adultery.
Despite an acquittal, she has few options to start her life anew, the Washington Post reports. Human rights lawyers say her plight is all too common in a nation where laws against adultery and abduction for sex are being used to intimidate women.
Criminal complaints of adultery are often filed by men who are angry when a wife seeks a divorce or by parents who are unhappy because a daughter has left home and rejected their choice of a husband, the story says.
Lawyer Hina Jilani, founder of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, told the Post that criminal charges are often brought “to harass and intimidate women.”
Women accused of adultery can be stigmatized by life. Arshad spent nine months in prison before her acquittal. Now she lives in a government-run shelter where women are sent after trial to be safe from husbands or brothers. It has guards and bars on the doors and windows. The government runs 1,000 such shelters.
The shelter will not release women who stay there unless they return to their husband, live with a blood relative or marry another man. Arshad doesn’t want to rejoin her husband, even though it means she will not be able to see her sons. And she does not want to return to her family, which forced her to marry at age 14.
She is a virtual prisoner in the shelter where she is learning embroidery and watches TV.
Meanwhile she has initiated divorce proceedings. While men in Pakistan can end a marriage by saying “I divorce thee” three times, women must go to court, the story says.
