The Ministry of Interior has denied that there is a proposal to allow Saudi women to access security database which include CVs of men who wish to marry them.

This personal information of all Saudis is in government database but is supervised by security authorities to protect their privacy, the ministry’s security spokesman has clarified.

However, some Saudi men tend to hide their information when they approach families with marriage proposals because they do not want to be rejected, particularly if they have been involved in criminal activities.

This reason is also a major contributory factor in the increasing rate of divorce in the Kingdom.

“There are some Saudi families who ask their relatives working in security departments for some information on marriage-seekers. However, there is no system to open the database of Saudi families due to the privacy protection in the Ministry of Interior,” social activist Hamza Al-Sharif told Arab News.

According to a study published last year, divorce rates in the Kingdom stand at 2.5 cases for every 1,000 men above the age of 15 years. The country ranks second among the GCC countries, after Bahrain where the rate is 2.7 cases for every 1,000 people.

The same study showed an upward trend in divorce cases in 2012 compared to 2010, when divorce cases amounted to 75 a day. Data provided by the Ministry of Justice showed that 90 percent of the divorce cases involved Saudis who were married to Saudi women, which translated to more than 27,000 cases.

In earlier reports, the Ministry of Economy and Planning confirmed that while courts and marriage officials register around 70,000 marriage contracts annually, they also process more than 13,000 official divorce papers.

“Some Saudi women discovered their husbands’ actual behavior only after marriage such as fighting with people and getting into trouble with their employers.




Therefore, some families would like to collect as much information as possible about prospective grooms before accepting their marriage proposals,” Sara Al-Tunisi, a social specialist, told Arab News.