Cultural Heritage Leaves Bangladesh Women at Mercy of Men

The right side of Saidur Hawa’s sari slipped, exposing a scar that looked like hot wax dripping over her shoulder. There were slash lines above her breast, pale marks like chalk-white thread on her skin. She blushed and covered up quickly.

“My husband wanted a second wife, and I said no. We fought and he took a razor and he slashed me. . . . But I won the fight because in the end he changed his mind. I am the only wife.”

Saidur, now 21, was only 12 at the time of the attack. It never occurred to her to call the police. The terror of the razor was less than the terror of being without the man who had been her husband and sole supporter since she became his 9-year-old bride.

She regards herself as lucky. Her one-room house is dry, and her husband, who makes about $1 a day in a butcher shop, sneaks home scraps so that she and their two sons get enough protein to keep them healthy. “He is a good husband, he doesn’t hit me anymore and he makes sure the family is taken care of,” she said.

Women were guaranteed equal rights in the 1972 Bangladesh constitution. But most of those rights exist only on paper because this is a fundamentalist Muslim society in which women traditionally are treated as inferiors. While many of the customs that have developed from this tradition are common throughout the Muslim world, the extreme poverty of the country compounds the repression of women in Bangladesh.

“The status of women in Bangladesh is a creation of a long cultural heritage in which women were regarded as lesser beings,” said T. A. M. Sabsuddin, a sociology professor at Dhaka University, adding that poverty and the religious taboo against questioning one’s fate have compounded the problems.

“There is nothing in law or even in the Koran that says women are less than a man,” said Shah Rahman, a lawyer who specializes in defending abused women. “But culturally we teach our children that a male can relate to a woman either as a mother or as an object of abuse, never as an equal.”

The attack on Saidur was not a crime of passion but of property. Her husband had not met his intended second wife when he broached the idea to her. He simply wanted a new wife because she would come with a dowry and he wanted the cash.

Similarly, Momataz Begum’s husband did not necessarily love his new second wife more than he loved her. He was just tired of paying for two homes.

He attacked the 29-year-old Momataz with a knife, severely slashing her throat and abdomen in a rage after she refused to allow the second wife into her house, which had been a gift from her father. She was unconscious for three days. Neighbors called the police, and her husband was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in jail.

However, government officials evicted her and her five children when she continued to refuse to allow the second wife to move into the house. The house has been seized by the government, awaiting a court decision on whether Momataz is the sole owner of the house, as she claims.

“We experience every day the cruelty of this impoverished society which places the greatest burden on the women folk,” said Maleka Begum, founder of the country’s largest women’s group, Mahila Parishad. “All things are run by religion and personal law (tradition), which dictates that women are tortured from birth. They are denied things given to their brothers, they are denied education because it would be a waste, they are denied an attitude of self-worth. In a poor family, a father will spend all his money for his son, not for his daughter. The last bit of food goes to the son.”

UNICEF statistics bear her out, showing that the child mortality rate for girls is nearly double that for boys. Only 10% of all girls ages 10 to 14 are in school, approximately one-third the school attendance rate for males. Three percent of adult women are literate, compared to about 20% of the men, according to estimates by development workers.

Many women use the name Begum, meaning female in the Bengali language, which has only neuter gender, because they were never given their own names. They grow up being the equivalent of Female Smith until they marry Mr. Jones and become Female Jones.

Although there has been some liberalization over the last five years, more than 90% of marriages are arranged by relatives, with the bride and groom meeting for the first time at the wedding.

“It is like being sold into slavery,” said Atiq Rahman, an Oxford University-educated scientist who heads the Bangladesh Center for Advanced Studies, a local think tank that concentrates on social and scientific issues. “There is no return. She can’t go back if it doesn’t work. . . . For men, there is divorce, abandonment. Women don’t have that option.”

Lutfun Nesa was 17 when she married. Her father gave her to a 41-year-old man who knew nothing of her beauty or wit but was seduced by the dowry of furniture, cookery and $1,500 in cash--more than three years’ salary for a working-class family. It seemed she had been placed well; her new husband was handsome, cool-tempered and relatively wealthy.

But her father did not know that his daughter was becoming a second wife and that the man was still supporting his first spouse and four children. Lutfun found out about the first wife a year after her marriage.

“I accepted the situation,” Lutfun said. “There was no alternative.”

Five years ago, after nine years of marriage and only several months after the birth of their seventh child, her husband left Lutfun and returned to the first wife.

“His children from the first wife demanded it,” Lutfun said. “He invited me to live with him and the first wife, but that I would not do.”

Lutfun and the children have received no support, but she has rented out a room in her house for $100 a month, enough to survive. Now her husband has divorced her and is demanding that she leave the house--a demand she is fighting in court.

Most women do not have the money and the know-how to use the legal system. Government officials admit that corruption is so rampant that it often requires a series of bribes to file a court case and that the free law clinics are understaffed. As a result, poor women have little recourse when they are abandoned by their husbands.

“My husband left me with nothing,” said Sulesa Begum, 30, who works as a maid and lives with her four children in a tiny island village of Homna, two hours’ river boat ride from Dhaka. “My father-in-law lets me stay in his house, but there is no way to force my husband to give us any money,” she said. “My 3-year-old baby is ill. He needs more food, but I can’t get my husband to pay.”

With employment opportunities almost nonexistent for women in a country where the unemployment and underemployment rate for men is about 50%, women usually feel that they have to stay in their husband’s home regardless of how they are treated.

“When a man wants a new wife, the woman will generally try her best to stay in the home. . . . The existing laws are very weak. If she is poor, she will just stay and try to live with the new situation,” feminist Aeyasa Khanam said.

The government has tried to improve the situation of women by passing a series of laws outlawing dowry and spousal abuse and tightening rape and assault laws. One of the new laws outlawed acid attacks on women. Acid attacks were mostly carried out by husbands trying to extort dowry from the woman’s father or to force a woman to accept a second wife, but in the late 1970s random attacks started to occur.

“There used to be a problem with men throwing acid in the faces of women, disfiguring them for life,” said Father Dan Timn, a former Fulbright Fellow who has been a Catholic missionary here for 29 years. “Then they made it a capital crime. I can’t support the death penalty, but it has wiped out acid attacks. The word came from the president’s office that he wanted the law enforced, and it was.”

But many laws designed to protect women are never enforced.

“There is a law that a girl can’t be married before 19, but it is generally ignored,” Aeyasa Khanam said. “Girls get married very young, especially in poor families. The father can’t maintain his daughter so he tries to shift the burden. Every father is eager to, as early as possible, dispose of the daughter.”

Rehana Khanam, 16, hopes her father obeys that law. The star pupil in the Dakhin Surma College, a new secondary school that sits in the middle of horizon-to-horizon rice paddies in the northern district of Sylhet, said her 17-year-old sister was pulled out of school and given in marriage last year.

“I hope to complete my master’s,” she said, shyly pulling her veil across her face. “But it is up to my parents’ desire. The girl has no say, but we all desire to finish our education first, get married later. . . . I have told him I’d like to finish school, but if he decides I will marry, I will marry.”

Another law that is almost universally ignored is the 1980 statute prohibiting dowry. Because fathers are eager to have their daughters marry young and because there is a shortage of grooms, the dowry the father can provide generally plays a major role in how successful he will be in getting his daughter married.

“I wish to get my 16-year-old daughter married,” said Samsun Nahar, a 37-year-old factory worker who makes about 1,500 taka, or $46, a month. “Proposals are coming, but they are expensive. One wanted 20,000 taka, another 40,000 taka. Six proposals have come so far but they are all expensive. . . . I am saving because it will take money to marry her into a good family.”

Fathers who are trying to find a second husband for a divorced daughter have an even bigger problem.

Salima Begum, 30, said her first husband left for a new wife nine years ago, shortly after the birth of their daughter. After the divorce, she moved back in with her parents.

Eventually her father found her a new husband--a former mental patient who insists that his wife cover her face with a veil.

“I am a former mental case,” Chunfur Ali, 50, said. “I wandered the streets for 20 years. Now I am better and I needed a wife.”

“He is the best my father could find,” Salima whispered.

Still she considers herself fortunate to be married again.

Although no statistics are available, feminists claim that dozens of women sent back to their parents’ home by their husbands kill themselves each week. A random sampling of Dhaka newspapers over the course of one month revealed an average of two suicides by young women each day.

“Most of these women are uneducated, unemployed, and they look on themselves as an extra burden to their families, to be sent home by their husbands,” said Mahmuda Begum, a legal services volunteer. “So they simply despair.”