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My Profile Top News Reuters top ten news stories delivered to your inbox each day. Subscribe You are here: Home > News > International > Article Home Business & Finance News U.S. Politics International Technology Entertainment Sports Lifestyle Oddly Enough Health Science Special Coverage Video Pictures Your View The Great Debate Blogs Weather Reader Feedback Do More With Reuters RSS Widgets Mobile Podcasts Newsletters Your View Make Reuters My Homepage Partner Services CareerBuilder Affiliate Network Professional Products Support (Customer Zone) Reuters Media Financial Products About Thomson Reuters Battered Afghan wives opt for divorce instead of suicide Tue Jul 21, 2009 8:55pm EDT Email | Print | Share | Reprints | Single Page [-] Text [+] By Golnar Motevalli HERAT, Afghanistan (Reuters) - After regular beatings, torture and attempted murder by her husband, 35-year-old Zahra tried to burn herself to death to escape her marriage. Then she learned of a safer option: divorce. Zahra is among a growing number of women in Afghanistan's western Herat province who, with the help of a women's charity, have taken on patriarchal laws to get a divorce, a taboo in the devoutly Muslim, formerly Taliban-led state. "I did not spend a single happy day with my husband ... he was not like a human being. He used to beat me every day," she said, revealing scars on her right leg and feet where her husband had deliberately given her electric shocks. After marrying at 14, Zahra, who declined to give her full name for her own safety, said she suffered years of abuse. Then a property dispute with her in-laws turned her marriage into a full-blown nightmare. "They wanted to kill me three or four times. Once they gave me rat poison ... I cannot go out because of the divorce and my four brothers are looking for me; they are after me to kill me." The divorce led to her father disowning her and cost her custody of her seven sons and two daughters. Initially her ex-husband let her keep her daughters on condition that she didn't remarry. But her financial circumstances were so dire in a country where women rarely work that she eventually remarried and when her ex-husband found out he took the daughters back. A MAN'S LAW Suraya Pakzad runs a safe house for women in Herat and has helped several women, including Zahra, divorce their husbands. She says her outreach programs, which inform women about divorce, discourages them from burning themselves and helps them tackle divorce law. The number of divorces have doubled in Herat over the past two years, according to Pakzad, while reported cases of self-immolation have declined. "In 2006 we had 98 cases of women killing themselves with fire ... in 2008, there was about 73 cases, so there has been a definite decrease," Pakzad said. "When we brought the number of self-immolation cases down, automatically the number of divorces went up because women realized that they could not solve their problems by burning themselves," she said. Under Afghanistan's Islamic law, a man can divorce without needing his wife's agreement. But if a woman seeks a divorce then she has to have the approval of her husband and needs witnesses who can testify in court that the divorce is justified. "A man can, with great ease, tell the court that his wife's behavior is inappropriate, that she does not behave in the home, and wants to divorce her. A man decides a woman's future with one piece of paper," said Maria Bashir, chief prosecutor in Herat. Continued... View article on single page Share: Del.icio.us Digg Mixx Yahoo! 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