Rising trend of divorce

A sharp rise in the number of people seeking divorce from their spouses in the two city corporations of Dhaka is indeed a cause for serious concern. The Dhaka South City Corporation (DSCC) and the Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC) together received 6,776 divorce petitions in 2011 and the number of such petitions rose to 8,191 in 2013. What is notable here is the higher number of women seeking a break-up of conjugal relationship. Against 65 per cent of women, 35 per cent men seek the same. Time is not apparently propitious for stable relationship between men and women. Living in a treacherous time, even people in this part of the world are going the way their counterparts in the Western world have long started doing. Up to a certain point, there is no harm if two different individuals part ways mutually because both are sanguine about the hopelessness of their life together. In that case, though, two persons with respect for each other's opinions, values and approach to life know what they are doing.

Most likely, it has predominantly remained an urban problem. In rural areas, women hardly enjoy opportunities to go against their husbands. Not that there are not women who are individualistic but circumstances force them to bear with what is undignified for a woman. In rare cases, women look for separation in villages. Yet it is necessary to have a clear picture of the feuding marital positions all across the country. Let a system be developed to record such cases. So far as the divorce situation in the capital is concerned, personality clash or similar other criteria of refined taste has rarely been cited for the break-up of nuclear families here. One reason for women's lead in divorce seeking is physical and mental repression. The other serious complaint made by divorce-seekers concerns extra-marital affairs. If these are suppressed in high society, at the lower levels dominant husbands have no pretence to go for polygamy. They just abandon their wives at will and such cases simply go unrecorded.

So the message is loud and clear: society is falling apart because of lack of value system and knowledge-based education. Prompted by consumerism, people are becoming arrogant and at times immoral. If educated spouses part their ways in order to be happy, they simply wreak, more often than not, the life of their children, if there are any. Intolerant and uncompromising when it matters most, they have no qualms about becoming licentious in matters of relations with the opposite sex and making compromise on ethical consideration when it comes to illegal financial gains. For oriental societies, storms such as this prove fatal because the value systems here are different from the West. Unwed children or children of single mothers face no social stigma there but lives will be made a hell for them in societies like Bangladesh. Quite logically, there is a need for sociologists and other experts to put their heads together in order to suggest ways out of the rising family turmoil.