JEDDAH, 9 September 2006 — The Mawadda Social and Family Reconciliation and Counseling Center in Jeddah receives thousands of requests from married couple to save their family from breakup.
“Our youths are not, unfortunately, educated on the importance of leading a secure married life,” said Dr. Hassan Al-Shelabi, director of the center. “While the parents are keen to give their children luxury homes, rich food and fashionable clothing they neglect to prepare the children for a healthy married life and being good husbands or wives.”
Al-Shelabi said the center had received complaints about seven cases of sex parties inside homes where men asked their wives to sleep with friends.
Such marriages would end up in divorce because the love that bind couples together was absent and the women involved lost hope of their husbands protecting their honor, Al-Shelabi said, adding that these youths picked their cultural values from television channels and Internet cafes or evil companions leading them to prohibited relations and deceptions of various nature. He stressed the need for strong family intervention before the young people slide in to dangerous life styles.
Al-Shelabi said the center’s approach to saving families from breaking up was two-pronged. First, ways to ensure their return to normalcy are found. The next move is to initiate them to preventative measures so that they do not come up with the same problems again. Pre-emptive measures involve training and counseling of the couple and preparing the man and woman for a closely-knit family life. The cooperation of the other members of the family is also enlisted at this stage.
Al-Shelabi said the family counseling center received 42,000 phone calls this year. More than 70 percent of the cases were resolved. The reconciliation division in the center and its branch in the marriage court solved 71 percent of the 8,500 cases they received. The center also helped 5,200 young men and women get ready for married life.
Al-Shelabi noted with satisfaction that only less than three percent of the youths who attended the center’s courses had complained of difficulties in adjusting with family problems. He put the number of the women of varying ages who benefited from the center’s female division at 6,375.
The role of the center is to resolve problems before the couple end up in divorce court.
In the court, the judge passes a divorce case to the reconciliation office where a special committee studies the problem and listens to the couple’s complaints separately before making them sit together and find out ways to reconcile. If they insist on divorce, then the office helps them to do it in a dignified manner so that after-divorce proceedings such as the settlement of the financial matters and custody of children are completed smoothly.
