Despair driving women to commit suicides in Pakistan
Present trend of rising food prices in Pakistan is driving women to commit suicide who face increased tensions within their homes. Between January and May this year more than 300 women have ended their lives primarily due to financial reasons.
Gujrat, Pakistan: Fareeda Bibi, 55, is uncertain what to do. Her husband, Ayaz Muhammad, 60, a mason, seems equally perturbed but just as helpless.
In the couple's two-room house, in Gujrat, 120 km north of Lahore, an industrial town known for its fan factories, Fareeda said their youngest daughter, Kulsoom, 23, was married two years ago. “Now she is threatening to commit suicide. We don't know whether to bring her home or where to seek help," Fareeda said.
Tradition dictates that bringing a married daughter back into the parental home is taboo, and would almost certainly mean the end of her brief marriage. But Fareeda has read about the growing number of suicides, and fears her daughter could also be in danger.
"Her husband is unemployed, his brothers cannot help and my daughter says they hardly have anything to cook each day. There is great tension in the house due to this constant stress, and my daughter has been beaten up by her husband several times," said Fareeda. “This is driving her to despair."
The case of Kulsoom is not unusual. According to Naeem Mirza of the Lahore-based Aurat Foundation, a nongovernmental organisation (NGO) working for women’s rights, 1,322 cases of violence against women were reported during the first three months of 2008.
These included 119 cases of domestic violence and 66 cases of women committing suicide.
Inflation
Tanvir Jehan, a prominent women's rights activist and the director of the Lahore-based Democratic Commission for Human Development (DCHD) NGO, said: "Inflation has a negative effect on everyone. But its impacts are particularly grim for women, who face increased tension within their homes."
She added: "Inflation - especially since it affects items used by ordinary people such as flour, sugar and so on - is definitely a factor in the increased rate of suicide among women".
Inflation in Pakistan is currently running at over 11%, with food prices having risen by 17% compared to last year, and this is making it very difficult for some families to get enough to eat, given that wages have not increased.
Some stories of suicide committed by women are especially harrowing. Earlier this year, a young mother in Lahore, Bushra Bibi, flung herself and her two young children onto a railway track allowing an approaching train to cut them to pieces.
In a suicide note she cited poverty and increased hardship due to inflation as the reason for her decision.
In 2007, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan recorded 2,040 suicide cases, including 692 by women. Financial hardships, or “domestic problems”, which the commission said were often triggered by issues relating to finances, were cited as the reasons for 870 of the cases.
Between January and May 2008 there were 1,049 suicides, including 322 by women. It is believed most cases of attempted suicide and many suicides go unreported due to the social and religious stigma attached to them.
Other factors
Suicide is a criminal offence under Pakistani law and families often cover up the act.
Activists like Tanvir Jehan believe the growing number of suicides among females is due to rising frustration - a phenomenon in which the lack of social and political progress is "certainly one factor".
Also, the fact that at least 44% of people, most of them women, according to the Karachi-based Pakistan Association for Mental Health (PAMH), are depressed, is almost certainly a factor.
A study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry last year, based on a survey of 680 people in a village in the Bara Tribal Agency in Pakistan's north, found that 39% of women, compared to 21% of men, had contemplated suicide.
The authors suggested this had something to do with the fact that women reported more social problems, including those stemming from a lack of money.
The Punjab government has attempted to mitigate the effects of the food crisis on the very poor, but as Pakistan Finance Minister Naveed Qamar conceded, the "food crisis is a pressing one". It is unlikely to be solved immediately. The World Bank and other international agencies have warned it could worsen over the coming months.
