Divorced Women

It is a journey in courts’ lobbies in Yemen where you can find dozens of females in raw and in black waiting to hear the sentences. It is a simple sentence that each one of them is highly and fully in need of. Also, it is the sentence that will set her free from the nightmare of an invisible man to the shadow of the social stigma of divorce. Different stories have been told, different types of violence have been committed behind the closed doors, but the same fate goes on and on.

This journey reminds me of the dark ages of women when young girls were hidden into the sand by fathers fearing poverty and loss of social status. However, in our days, divorced women are the burden of their families. They simply want to hide them as if they committed a crime of being divorced. They would rather stay as old wrecks of ships until they die, better than being caged as wild creatures.

GOD legislated divorce as a solution provided that couples cannot bare living together under certain conditions. In our society, it is a death sentence for any woman. Moreover, even if she wants to start all over again, she would be excluded and surrounded by assumptions, claims and stereo tapes about the reason she was divorced as if it is not a shared practice of both man and wife. Furthermore, in some cases, she would be prevented from mingling with other women claiming that she would corrupt other females ethically. Therefore, under uncertain and, growing number of cases, we find those women out of the right track.

I fully admit that the latter lines were gloomy, unfair and realistically hurting. However, sometimes the truth is more painful and words are useless towards it. We all know that it is-divorce- a must in some cases and a need in others. And we all know that men continue life after divorce, but women are stigmatized, harassed, abused and left out without any kind of support from society.

I am not against men nor am I a women advocate. It is just a matter of humanity that divorced women have the right to live and try again to flip the coin and seek normal life, or at lease to be reintegrated to the society through programs and projects that reinforce their self-confidence and regain and collect their strengths.