A Wife’s Darkest Hour: Dowry Violence in Bangladesh

“I am so scared. I am scared that my family will be broken. I don’t want my children to live without a father or a mother.  He tells me, ‘Daughter of a beggar, go away.  I don’t need you.’  He also says that I am only good for beating.” Shaheen, a young woman in Bangladesh who does not even know how old she is, reveals the dark side of her married life. She is married to Mohhamed Shohag, a carpenter by profession.  Shaheen has spent most of her marriage suffering through abuse.

For the past eight years, Shaheen has been beaten by her husband for the same reason time and again: the demand for a dowry. According to Shaheen, her husband’s family did not demand a dowry at her marriage. Yet, her husband changed his mind after the fact and asked her family to give a dowry. Shaheen’s family was unable to meet his demand, and Shaheen ended up being punished for her family’s inability to provide a dowry.  Shaheen thinks living with a husband that physically and emotionally abuses her every day is her fate, and that she cannot do anything about it. Absolutely refusing the idea of complaining against her husband, Shaheen says, “I have never gone inside the police. I have to live with him, right? So how will I go to the police? I don’t want to talk against my husband.”

Shaheen is just another example of hundreds of thousands of young married women who are beaten nearly to death by their husbands every day. “We, women, are helpless. There is no one to help us. Who is there to help us, to stop our husbands beating us? No one likes to be beaten. It hurts a lot.” With these words, she unveils the story of spousal abuse and other forms of violence against women in Bangladesh.  This violence takes various forms such as battering, domestic and dowry-related violence, acid attacks, rape, fatwa (the Islamic law issued by an Imam, the leader of a mosque), sexual harassment in the workplace, and even human trafficking.

Even before marriage, women suffer in Bangladesh.  Girls are fed last and least, and are often seen as a burden; this is typical in most South Asian countries. Parents see marriage as a safe way to get rid of their daughters. Unfortunately, girls find no heaven in their marital houses because some families demand a dowry from their daughters-in-law. While Bangladesh recognizes Islam as its official religion, dowry continuously contradicts both religion and the law. According to the Qu’ran, receiving dowry from the bride’s family is haram, forbidden by the Islamic law; it is the husband’s family that should provide mohorana, money for the bride’s family.

Statistics show that 88% of the recently married Muslim wives in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, did not receive their mohorana, but were forced to give a dowry.  Even though girls and women are forced to wear the burqa, as a means for following the guidelines of the Qu’ran, people easily forget about religion when it comes to taking or demanding a dowry.  “It has become a practice to give dowry to the groom’s family to show gratitude that he has agreed to marry the bride. But the truth is, it has become a kind of source of income for the groom and an easy way to get money without working for it,” explains Dr. Saira Rahaman Khan, an Assistant Professor at the School of Law at the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee University (BRAC) and a founding member of Odhikar, a leading non-governmental organization working to raise awareness on human rights abuses in Bangladesh. According to Khan, “social pressure on the bride’s family and fear” are the factors that keep nurturing the dowry system – despite the fact that it is legally banned.

“I do not see any decrease in the trend, despite the fact that there is a Dowry Prohibition Act in place and several large NGOs and government initiatives to stop violence against women,” says Khan, explaining the factors that are conducive to the continuation of dowry-related violence in Bangladesh: “lack of implementation of laws, lack of political will of the government, the perception of domestic violence as a social matter, ingrained ‘traditions,’ and especially the overall corruption that directly and indirectly influences all of the above.”

Md. Shah Alam, the second officer of the Khulshi Police Station in Chittagong, speaks gravely about the limitations the law itself encounters. “Police or the court can’t stop people. We can’t put each and every person in jail,” he says, citing the experiences of his colleagues at the police station.  “So we have to make sure that people know it is a bad thing, you know to beat their wife or to ask them to give money.”

Shaheen Begum (a different woman than the Shaheen quoted at the beginning of this article) has been an outspoken critic of the status quo since her second husband’s death.  She says that even though she tries to increase consciousness among her neighbors, her attempts are often fruitless. “People ask to tell the police. But they don’t do it, it brings more problems to those girls,” she says.  “They don’t want to live without a husband, without a family. And then they are scared that their husband’s family will kill them.”

Asia - Bangladesh