At least 271 new lawsuits were filed at the family courts of Rawalpindi district, which re-opened on Friday after a month-long vacation.
The majority of lawsuits were filed by women petitioners and pertained to divorce, payment of dowry, alimony and child expense as well as return of dowry. At least 21 men had also filed petitions seeking the return of grieving spouses.
The courts were closed from August 1 till August 31 for summer vacations.
The family courts have authorised the new cases for hearing, and issued notices to the respondents.
Faisal Khan Niazi, the head of the district bar association, said that the high influx of cases was expected to continue over the next three to four days. The courts will have around 100-200 such lawsuits filed every day till Tuesday, he said.
Niazi said that he had filed 11 such cases. The regular hearing of family cases which were under hearing has also resumed, he added.
Advocate Tayyaba Abbasi, who is also the secretary of a rights collective, said that the growth in the number of family cases was ‘alarming’. We as a society need to take this seriously, she added.
A total of 5,804 family cases were registered in Rawalpindi's family courts during the first half of the year, which lawyers said was much higher compared to the past. The courts sanctioned 2,393 divorces, with 78 women being instructed to return to their husbands.
According to a 2019 survey carried out by Gallup and Gilani Pakistan, 58 per cent of Pakistanis believed that divorce was becoming more prevalent in the country.
According to Abbasi, social media applications like TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook had contributed to this rise in cases. She said the number of free-will marriages were on the rise as opposed to marriages arranged by families. She said that the situation had reached a point where it threatened the family system.
It merits mention that there is no data to corroborate Abbasi’s claim of a correlation between free-will marriages and divorce rates. There is limited data on divorces, which are complicated and often hushed up in conservative Pakistan, and whether the marriage was free-will or otherwise. Meanwhile, social and economic determinants have to to be factored in when considering the situation that led to the separation.
The same 2019 survey found that two in respondents elieved that a couple's in-laws were responsible for most of case of divorce.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 2nd, 2023.
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