Significant numbers of women, such as members of the Mt Hagen Handicraft Group in the Highlands region of Papua New Guinea, have been impacted by HIV/AIDS with consequences including widowhood and hardship. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
GOROKA, Papua New Guinea, Aug 11 2015 (IPS)

It has only been six months since Iveti, 37, lost her husband of 18 years, but already she is facing hardship and worry about the future.

Similar to many married women in the rural highlands region of Papua New Guinea, a southwest Pacific Island state of seven million people, she stayed at home to look after their two children, a daughter aged 11 and a son now in his early twenties, while her husband’s income paid for the family’s needs.

“There was always food to serve to my children, but now the man who provided the food has gone. On the days we don’t have food I make ice-blocks and sell them at the market for 20 or 30 kina [seven to 10 dollars]." -- Iveti, a 37-year-old widow
“I worry about food; I worry about bills and the children. I worry about the relatives who come and visit to mourn with us, because we have to kill a pig [for a feast] or give them something. Who is going to come and say they have the money for all this?” Iveti frets as she sits in her modest home on the outskirts of Goroka, a town in Eastern Highlands Province.

She is surrounded by her children, and her husband’s mother and sister who also live with her.

“There was always food there to serve my children, but now the man who provided the food has gone. On the days we don’t have food I make ice-blocks and sell them at the market. We get 20 kina (seven dollars) or 30 kina (10 dollars). Every two days we pay about 20 kina for the power and with the 10 kina (about 3.60 dollars) which is left, we buy a tin of fish.

“My daughter goes to school and we budget 4 kina (just over a dollar) for her lunch,” she continued.

There is a diversity of widows’ experiences in Papua New Guinea. Those who have completed secondary or tertiary education and have an independent source of income are in a strong socio-economic position to look after themselves and their children.

However, more than 80 percent of the population resides in rural areas where many women have limited access to education and employment.

Female literacy in the Eastern Highlands, for example, is about 36.5 percent. Gender inequality in the country is exacerbated by social practices, such as early and forced marriage, bride price and widespread domestic and sexual violence experienced by two-thirds of women in the country.

While there are no accurate statistics available about widows in Papua New Guinea, the national Widows Association claims that most have been in widowhood for between five and 30 years.

For women in the highlands, the risk of losing a husband is increased due to the prevalence of tribal warfare. Outbreaks of fighting between different clan groups can be triggered by disputes over landownership or pigs, the most prized livestock, or ‘payback’ for a wrong committed against a community.

And, in most cases, the death of a male warrior plunges the wife and children into a precarious existence.

Families are also being impacted by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. By 2010, 31,609 cases of the virus had been reported with the highest prevalence of 0.91 percent recorded in the Highlands, slightly higher than the national rate of 0.8 percent, which is estimated to have decreased to about 0.7 percent last year.

When a husband dies, the widow and children usually have the right to remain on the husband’s land and property. But this is often not the case if AIDS, which is accompanied by social stigma, has been the cause of death.

Agatha Omanefa, Women’s Project Officer at Eastern Highlands Family Voice, a non-governmental organisation dedicated to counselling and supporting families, told IPS that while extended families were traditionally very protective of vulnerable members, she had witnessed rising cases of brothers of the deceased husband making moves to claim the land.

When “the husband’s relatives come in to share the properties the widow becomes a loser with her children […]. Sometimes they come up with stories, history, such as: ‘you are from there, your husband is from here’ and then she [the widow] needs someone to support her to secure the land,” she explained.

“It is having a big impact on widows’ lives, especially when they have small children. So they often keep little food gardens to try and maintain the children’s welfare as well as themselves.”

Families in Papua New Guinea are traditionally large with up to eight or 10 offspring, and the struggle includes paying for children to complete education, especially to secondary level. Female headed households are several times more likely to be below the absolute poverty line, according to government reports.

But one of the greatest threats to a widow’s welfare is the risk of being accused of sorcery. In nearby Simbu Province, women aged 40-65 years are six times more likely than men to be blamed for using witchcraft to cause a death or misfortune in the community, reports Oxfam, and the consequences, including torture and murder, can be tragic.

“There is growing concern that sorcery accusations that lead to killings, injuries or exile are often economically or personally motivated and used to deprive women of their land or property,” the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, Rashida Manjoo, reported in 2013.

Widows with sons, however, have a source of protection.

“In our culture in the Highlands, when you have a son, no-one will chase you out, because you will gain strength from your son, but if a woman does not bear any child then she is more vulnerable,” Irish Kokara, treasurer of the Eastern Highlands Provincial Council of Women, explained.

President Jenny Gunure added that there was also a lack of awareness about women’s rights and the law at the village level, a situation the women’s council is working to rectify through a bottom-up education programme aimed at rural women, which was begun last year.

However, Kokara believes that the risk of violence will not diminish until the behaviour of young men, who often perpetrate such crimes as part of vigilante gangs, is addressed.

“It is the youths who take drugs, like marijuana, who are the ones burning the women and hanging them on trees. So we need to change the youths first, then we can change the community,” she declared.

In recent weeks widows across the country have called through the local media for the government to introduce legislation to better support recognition of their rights.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

A Kashmiri woman with the picture of her son who went missing 17 years ago. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS.

By Athar Parvaiz
SRINAGAR, India , May 5 2014 (IPS)

Forty-seven-year-old Shahmala’s husband has been missing since 1993. In India’s restive Jammu and Kashmir state, she is what is known as a half-widow, a woman who has no clue whether her husband is dead or alive.

In December last year, a group of clerics issued a fatwa (Islamic decree) at a meeting in state capital Srinagar that women in Kashmir whose husbands had been missing for more than four years could remarry. But for Shahmala, the decree is of no consequence.While the decision has been widely welcomed, many also say it has come too late as most disappearances in Kashmir took place during the 1990s and early 2000s.

She has lost her youth, her children have grown up, and she has weathered the blows of life as a single mother for 21 years. The prospect of marriage at this stage seems remote.

“It should have come much earlier in order to help hundreds of half-widows across Kashmir remarry,” law professor Showkat Sheikh, who teaches at the Central University of Kashmir, told IPS.

According to the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (CCS), there are 1,500 half-widows in the state, where an insurgency since 1989 has resulted in many custodial disappearances of men. Human rights activists say most of these men were taken away by the security forces that were battling insurgents, and never seen again.

The ‘half-widows’ they leave behind are stigmatised, lonely and often under severe financial strain.

Many of these women join sit-ins by the relatives of missing persons every month in Srinagar to seek the whereabouts of their loved ones.

All these years, the half-widows of Muslim-majority Kashmir had to abide by Islam’s Hannafi school of thought that says a woman has to wait up to 90 years to marry again following the disappearance of her husband. But civil society groups appealed to Islamic scholars to find a solution to Kashmir’s problem.

The result was the new fatwa in December, a decree on remarriage coming for the first time since insurgency broke out in the state 25 years ago.

While the decision has been widely welcomed, many also say it has come too late as most disappearances in Kashmir took place during the 1990s and early 2000s. According to the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons in Kashmir, at least 8,000 people have gone missing.

Some of these cases, as Professor Sheikh observes, are 15 to 20 years old. “The half-widows who are still young might think of remarrying, but it might not be helpful for those now advanced in age,” he told IPS.

Shahmala has struggled all these years to make ends meet. Following her husband’s disappearance, her two brothers-in-law started taking care of her and her two children.

“But after four-five years, their wives wanted to live separately,” Shahmala told IPS in Lolab area, 110 km north of Srinagar. “Our family disintegrated, though my brothers-in-law continued to help with my children’s education.”

This arrangement too did not last long. Both children eventually dropped out of school. “Fatherless children can hardly study, especially when their mother is also uneducated and without any source of income,” she said.

“My son is now 21 and drives a cab to fend for the family,” Shahmala said. “Had his father been around, he would have been in a college or university. But this is what fate has chosen.”

Human rights activists say Kashmir’s half-widows do not fall under a compensation policy. The Kashmir government does give an equivalent of around 3,300 dollars to the families of those killed in militancy-related incidents.

Dr. Peerzada Mohammad Amin, who teaches sociology in Kashmir University, told IPS: “I think Islamic scholars across South Asia and particularly in our part of the world focus more on ritualistic Islam than on social problems even though it is clearly mentioned in basic Islamic literature that religion can’t be separated from politics, sociology and economy.

“In all these years, society, state and religion have failed to respond to this human problem in Kashmir. If they come forward in a committed manner, things can still be done for these women.”

In spite of societal pressures, there are many half-widows, especially the younger ones, who would like another shot at a happy married life.

Mehmooda (name changed) is only 29. When her husband went missing five years ago, they had been married for just one-and-a-half years, and was pregnant.

She has thought of remarrying but continues to live with her in-laws on their insistence. “They are very good people and they take good care of me,” she told IPS. But, she says, they didn’t agree when her parents brought a marriage proposal for her.

“While I respect my in-laws and appreciate whatever they are doing for me, I have my whole life ahead,” she said. “Things don’t always stay the same.”

Widows at a shelter in Varanasi in eastern India. Credit: Sudeshna Sarkar/IPS

By Sudeshna Sarkar
VARANASI, India , Aug 27 2013 (IPS)

Namuna Gautam was among millions of Indian women who celebrated Rakshabandhan this year, but one thing set her apart. It was the first time the 80-year-old took part in the festival, in which sisters pray for the long life, health and happiness of their brothers.

For decades, Gautam was part of a dark tradition that shunned widowed women as unlucky, and threw them out of home to fend for themselves.

“I didn’t even know what my husband looked or sounded like,” Gautam told IPS as she sat in the gloomy, dank corridor of the widows’ home in Varanasi where she had been sent to die at the age of 14.

“I was married when I was 10. During the wedding, I had to keep the veil over my face or people would have thought me immodest. My husband died the same year and my in-laws said I had brought them bad luck.” Like many others, she was married as a child, but due to join her husband only later.

Gautam, the daughter of a poor farmer who’d never been to school, was sent to look after her mother’s elderly brother and his wife.

“They decided to spend their last days in Varanasi, the holy city where if you die you are released from the cycle of rebirth and pain,” Gautam said. “I came with them and when they died, I lived on alms. Then I cooked and cleaned for people. I am infirm now and can’t work any more.”

Gautam is among the hundreds of Hindu upper caste widows born in times when female education was rare, polygamy flourished, and daughters had no share in family property.

“Bengal (the eastern Indian state) was renowned for its erudition, culture and social reforms. And yet it treated its young widows so appallingly; you can’t reconcile the two,” says social entrepreneur Bindeshwar Pathak.

His organisation Sulabh International known for its sanitation campaign is now adopting abandoned and forgotten old widows to give them back “the dignity and care they never had.”

“The women were married off at a very young age – some were just five or six. Their husbands, who were much older, married several times. When they died, they left dozens of young widows behind.

“These young girls were forced to shave off their hair, dress only in the coarsest white clothes, eat once a day and were barred from all social events as they were considered ill-omened.”

Usha Mishra broke down as she described her struggle for survival after her husband, a small trader, died four years after their marriage. “I was 15 when I was married,” says the 55-year-old, who looks much older. “By 19, I was a widow with a two-year-old daughter.”

The old practice of sati – burning widows alive on their husbands’ pyres – was banned in 1839. But spared a grisly death, most widows led a life of deprivation and humiliation.

The 16th century social reformer Chaitanya brought a group of widows from Bengal to Vrindavan close to Delhi to give them a home. That started a flood of families bringing their widows to the cities of Varanasi and Vrindavan and abandoning them there.

Besides being reduced to a life of abject begging or menial labour, there are also tales of young widows being forced into prostitution. Indo-Canadian film maker Deepa Mehta’s ‘Water’ in 2005 put the plight of the forgotten widows in the limelight.

This was followed by media reports. “The reports caught the attention of the Supreme Court, which asked its legal division, the National Legal Service Authority (NALSA), to look into the matter,” said Pathak.

“In August 2012, we were surprised to receive a letter from NALSA, saying there were around 1,700 such destitute widows. It asked whether Sulabh and ISKCON (the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, a religious organisation), could provide two meals a day for these women.

“Though it was not Sulabh’s area of expertise, we still went to Vrindavan to meet them. What we saw was heart-breaking.”

While most of the women are in their seventies, a few are in their eighties and nineties. The Uttar Pradesh state government had offered them 500 rupees (eight dollars) per month after their plight became known. But three years ago the money stopped.

“In Vrindavan, they then survived on ten rupees (15 cents) a day, money paid to them by the temple authorities if they attended the morning and evening prayer sessions,” Vinita Varma, who heads the widows initiative at Sulabh, told IPS.

“The younger ones augmented it a bit by making lamp wicks and stitching tiny garments for idols. But the older ones, who could not work any longer, had no option other than begging.”

Sulabh has adopted 1,000 widows in Vrindavan and Varanasi, providing them monthly support of 2,000 rupees (32 dollars) each, basic medical care and education.
Now it is trying to unite them with the community that had deserted them.

Last year, the white saris of the widows in Vrindavan turned a miraculous pink and green as they played Holi, the festival of colours, once prohibited for them.

This year, the Varanasi widows celebrated Rakshabandhan, and in October, some will return to Bengal after decades to watch Durga Puja, their biggest annual festival.

Pathak is lobbying for a law to ensure that widows receive basic education and vocational training. “Once they become breadwinners, their families will regard them with new respect.”