She is the victim, and the second wife of three men

Gaza, Publication and Information Unit

She is the victim of an extended family without awareness, a family that cared only about how and when their daughter, then no more than fifteen, would marry, and who would relieve them of the worry of having this beautiful girl in their home. D.Sh. turned to the Palestinian Center for Democracy and Conflict Resolution to tell us her tragic story, looking for a glimmer of hope by which she might improve her harsh life. Her story began with her being married to a man of forty who already had a first wife and children to support, while she was a young girl who did not grasp the meaning of marriage or its responsibilities.

From the moment she married that man she faced problems with his wife and his children and with her husband too, and when the problems piled up at home because of her presence in their lives he began to abuse her verbally. She did not remain with him long before he divorced her, without her having borne him children, so that he could return to his former life with his first wife and children. Now that she had become a divorced woman, young and beautiful, she was once again her family's chief preoccupation: marrying her off and being rid of her by any means.

So began the search for another husband for the daughter they regarded as a disgrace and a great worry in their home because she was divorced, and who would accept her a second time. By tragic coincidence, an elderly man was looking for a young and beautiful wife; he asked for her hand and the family agreed at once and married her to him. That man had a great many sons and daughters and an elderly wife who could not look after all her children. D.Sh. was the second wife for the second time. At first she tried to fit in with the members of the large family, and she became pregnant with her first daughter; the pregnancy distracted her from some of the gaps she suffered with a large family that could not attend to its own children, let alone look after a new wife. One day she was walking through that large house, which held many sons, daughters and grandchildren, and where the doors of the rooms were usually open to everyone. A closed door caught her attention. Curiosity took hold of her and she went to open it a crack, only to see the catastrophe that was the first and greatest shock of her life: her husband, the father, the head of the family, harassing his adolescent daughter. She went away at once, and a state of chronic depression took hold of her at what she had seen in that room, but she could not utter a word to anyone in the family. The shock was that he would regularly try to force himself on another of his daughters, and the one he had harassed hurried to expose their father. Their brothers did nothing but kill their father without any discussion, and they brought their father's wife to swear an oath that she had indeed seen their father trying to harass his daughters. She did swear that she had seen him in that state with his daughter, and afterwards his sons were arrested on a charge of murder. That was how it ended with that family.

As was her family's habit, she was married off a third time, and again as the second wife. The new husband was a sign of hope for her and for her daughter, because of his great love for her, and this was the first time in her marriages that she saw and felt love, with a young man only two years older than she was. She lived with him a decent life full of love and bore him four children, but soon family problems began to appear between her and his first wife, and when she began to rise above them and deal with her, she felt shaken in her self-confidence, unable to bear new problems in her life, and worthless to herself, to her daughter and even to her new husband. The problem here was that because of her previous experience of continual and crushing failure in her life she could not face life any further. She was now living within a new family, with an educated and cultured husband whose previous wife also had enough education to get the better of her. Instead of facing this she fell into a state of despair and social isolation that took her far from people and from society, which in turn left her husband unable to bear her problems and her shattered state of mind. The problems piled up without any confrontation or any search for solutions, and verbal, physical and psychological violence returned, practised on her by the new husband with whom the period of love and happiness she had felt for the first time had not lasted.

In the depth of her despair her friend brought her to the specialist counsellors at the Palestinian Center for Democracy and Conflict Resolution. The counsellor gave her the treatment she needed through emotional release, drawing out the feelings, emotions, anger and accumulated psychological problems inside her. She suffered from an unstable sense of self and an inability to take decisions on her own, because she was always afraid of being mocked for what she said and did by her new husband's family, who saw her only as an ignorant woman who had seen nothing in her life but problems and violence. But the counsellor soon began to treat her, drawing close to her and becoming her friend, treating her behaviour and changing it for the better and increasing her self-confidence. The counsellor focused on improving her relationship with her husband and restoring the love and security she had felt with him in the first years of their marriage and that she needed from him. This was achieved through the woman's only friend, who tried to persuade the husband that the relationship between them should return to what it had been and better. The counsellor persuaded her to complete her education and to read various books and magazines, and her condition began little by little to improve and develop. She is now striving to obtain her secondary school certificate, which has greatly improved her badly damaged state of mind. She began to attend to her appearance and to her young children and to care for them as an aware mother, and at last her husband was persuaded and returned to giving love to her and to his family and to understanding the state of mind that had been shattered over many long years. In this way D.Sh. overcame the problems and burdens that had accumulated over years, and lives a decent, new and clean life, as any other woman lives, with rights and duties, a family to hold her, children and a husband she can deal with and who gives her the love and affection she had long been denied.