IT IS a simple story, simple to understand and one that should be simple to solve. Somehow, though, things get complicated and the problem becomes a real dilemma merely because the system obstructs what is the obvious and simple solution. But I must start at the beginning. Okay, here it is: There is a family composed of a mother, husband, daughter and son. The mother complains to social services of being abused by her husband; later she escapes with her daughter who has also been systematically abused by her father. The two go to a shelter for battered women where the woman manages to get a divorce and is then sent out of the shelter. The daughter, however, remains and for her problem, there seems to be no solution. She wants to go with her mother but she is not allowed to because her legal guardian is her father rather than her mother. As she grows more and more depressed at the lack of a solution, she tries more than once to commit suicide. Even that does not end her suffering and misery; the shelter authorities want to get rid of what has become for them a “headache” and return her to her “legal guardian” — who earlier abused her.
The girl’s problem seems insoluble. Time now to ask what the system has done to help her. Nothing. She will remain in this horrible limbo, either until she is returned to her father or is finally successful in her attempts to kill herself. When interviewed by a social worker, the girl observed with considerable bitterness, “Even animals outside the Kingdom have people who defend them. Why can’t I find that here?”
This girl’s case is only one of thousands in which legal guardians destroy the lives of those they are meant to guard and protect — and the system supports them in doing so.
This raises another question: Isn’t it time to reconsider this whole business of guardians? The whole idea of male guardians needs to be revisited, examined and, in my opinion, scrapped. You hear complaints about guardians everywhere and many experience abuse first hand when their legal guardians are not sane or honest. What happens then? Nothing much since the system is stacked in favor of the guardians — always male — against those who are supposedly “guarded.” Crazy guardians can take advantage of this and get away with serious crimes with never a single word of reprimand, let alone actual punishment. Maybe one of the reasons for the system’s being so flawed and operating so badly is that the responsibility is always in one place.
Seriously, how did we reach this stage? How did we get to this point? When we read every day of abuse and denial of rights, we must ask ourselves the reasons for such. In essence, the whole idea of legal guardianship is for the protection of women. Somewhere along the line, however, things shifted from “protecting” to “controlling” — and the controlling became dominant. Protection is thus forced into the backseat when a woman wants to get a passport, go to a university, work or get married. All of these require permission from the woman’s guardian — male of course. No wonder the momentum to allow women to drive has been stopped in Saudi Arabia. If women were allowed to drive, that would be the beginning of the end of male control of them.
At the risk of repeating myself, I know very well that no matter how many times we look at something and point out its faults, that does not mean any action will be taken to correct those faults. So here I go repeating myself, asking for space to breath and move.
What brought this topic back to mind — not that it ever completely faded away as there are always unpleasant little reminders of how absurd this whole women-guardian partnership has become — was the case of Rania Al-Bouenin. She got married without her father’s permission and was recently forcibly divorced from her husband and forced to give up the child she had by him. The judge in the case ruled against her and her husband’s desires. Rania, a 34-year-old woman who just happens to be a medical doctor, could not be allowed to say: “I choose this man to be my husband” because her father did not approve of him. And to make the matter worse, the divorce ruling was issued in absentia.
So to all those women who have been denied the right to marry the man they chose or, as in the cases of Rania and Fatma, who love their husbands and want to live peacefully with them, the ruling means quite clearly and unequivocally, “You do not have the right to chose whom to marry or to live the way you want.”
The judge in Rania’s case said that if her father were found mentally ill, then she would have to go to court and the judge would become her guardian. Basically, she is an infantilized being, a mere object to be passed around from one male to another, from father to husband to brother, even though she is a full grown woman of 34 and fully able to make her own decisions. If this is not control by male chauvinists, I don’t know, nor can I imagine, what is!
