Dr Masuma Hasan: International Women’s Day and Aurat Foundation

It was a great day for Aurat Foundation. Not only because 8 March was International Women’s Day but also because the Sindh Assembly unanimously passed long-awaited legislation against domestic violence. In its dying days, the Assembly adopted the Domestic Violence (Prevention and Protection) Bill 2013. This much needed legislation, defines domestic violence as:

• Gender related, physical, emotional, verbal, psychological abuse
• Pattern of degrading or humiliating conduct
• Insult, ridicule, threat to cause physical pain, malicious prosecution and threat of violence
• Obsessive possessiveness or jealousy undermining the privacy, liberty, integrity and security of the victim
• Baseless accusations
• Citing barrenness of a spouse for the purpose of marrying again
• Willful or negligent abandonment of the aggrieved person

Dr. Masuma Hasan: Reaching Out to Widows in Pakistan

Aurat Foundation Pakistan is a member of the South Asian Network for Women’s Empowerment in Development (Sanwed) and I have had the privilege of representing Aurat Foundation at Sanwed’s inaugural meeting in Chennai in December 2005, at the Conference in Kathmandu in June 2010 and at the International Windows Day Conference held in London on 23 June 2006. These gatherings were highly rewarding. They enabled me to meet colleagues and partners, exchange views, and learn about new ideas, projects and initiatives.

Therefore, I was looking forward to this Sanwed workshop which has been organised by Women for Human Rights (Single Women Group) in Kathmandu but, unfortunately, am unable to attend it. However, I should like to put forward my views on the subject of ameliorating the plight of widows, which is our common concern, with respect to Pakistan.

Until the results of Pakistan’s Census of 2011 become available, we have to rely on statistics about widows on the Census of 1998 which I have quoted in the paper I read in the Conference in Kathmandu in June 2010. However, since the population of Pakistan has increased greatly since the last Census, given the pattern population growth, the number of widows must have also risen in the same proportion.