The issues
The issues
The lot of a widow is shocking in many parts of the world, the sorrow of losing her husband compounded by cruelty and injustice. Tradition variously dictates that she is unable to work or remarry; subjected to degrading ‘cleansing’ rituals; ejected from her home; her wealth taken by the deceased husband’s relatives; banned from wearing jewellery or coloured clothing; and left without any means of supporting herself or her children.
Much is made, rightly, of gender inequality – the lack of opportunity and education faced by millions of girls and the routine abuse and discrimination faced by women – but widows truly are the bottom of the pile – invisible, unheard, the poorest of the poor. The major initiatives aimed at relieving poverty – the Millennium Development Goals, the IMF Poverty Reduction Programme, Make Poverty History, the G20 – all are silent on the subject of widows.
Yet the problem, identified in a comprehensive research study recently (Vijay Dutt, Invisible Forgotten Sufferers – the Plight of Widows around the World, with research by Risto F Harma, Loomba Foundation / Konark Publishers, Delhi, 2010), is huge: 245 million widows around the world, of whom 100 million live in poverty. Together with their dependent children this is a crisis directly affecting some three quarters of a billion people. One and a half million children of poor widows will die before they reach the age of five. Cut off from earning a living, many widows have to rely on the efforts of their children, who miss out on education and end up on the streets or in factories, victims of exploitation and abuse.
In India, young widows are often ejected from the home where by tradition they lived with their late husband and his parents; they cannot return to their own family where they are considered to bring bad luck to their siblings; and they are not allowed to remarry. Widows in such a situation depend on their children, who become exploited on the streets or in factories in their efforts to earn a living for the family – and having no chance of an education, the widow‘s plight is felt down the generations.
In Africa the problems of widowhood are magnified and exacerbated by conflict, genocide and HIV, but here too, the problem is more deep-rooted in traditions and so-called “customary laws”. Widows are routinely deprived of their possessions, which are ’returned‘ to the late husband‘s family and in some countries they are ritually forced to have sexual intercourse with a relative or even a stranger for a week to ‘cleanse’ herself. Such dehumanising practices combined with the extreme poverty, injustice and deprivation that is commonplace among widows are at the heart of the Loomba Foundation’s determination that the voice of the widows be heard.
