Share this
Mister Wong
Digg
Del.icio.us
Slashdot
Furl
Yahoo
Technorati
Newsvine
Googlize this
Blinklist
Facebook
Wikio
Hear this text
Print
E-mail
Tags
President Jacob Zuma's wedding to Thobeka Madiba, his third current wife, at his home in Nkandla on Monday, 5 January has put the practice of polygamy squarely in the spotlight in South Africa. It makes for an interesting and opportune time to take note of a recently released report in Malaysia claiming that polygamous families hold negative effects for all involved. It claims that stress, quarrels and neglect are “normal” for the polygamous family.
The report is based on a large-scale study currently under way across Malaysia, which is said to uncover proof that polygamy harms everyone involved: from emotionally scarred children, to wives who think they would be better off as single-parent households, and even husbands who admit “I wouldn’t recommend it for my son; it’s quite stressful”.
The study is led by Norani Othman, a professor of Sociology at the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies (IKMAS); and Masjaliza Hamzah, who manages the research and publications unit at the non-governmental organisation, Sisters in Islam (SIS).
At the other end of the scale in Malaysia, is the Ikhwan Polygamy Club that promotes polygamy and claims to have more than 1 000 members across Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, Singapore, Thailand, the Middle East and Europe. It claims that the aim of the club is to help single mothers and women past “marrying age” to find husbands.
Members get together regularly for meetings and relationship counselling, which is given by senior members of the group.
Under Malaysian law, it is legal for Muslim men to marry as many as four wives, although they must obtain permission from an Islamic court, or syariah, to marry more than one. Women’s groups say it has become easier for men to obtain permission to take multiple wives in recent years, a development they say coincides with a rise in Islamic conservatism in Malaysia.
While some states require men to obtain the consent of their existing wives before seeking court permission to marry another wife, Sa’adiah Din, a family lawyer who practises in the syariah courts, said other states no longer required the wives’ consent.
To provide concrete data to support its anecdotal evidence about the impact of polygamy, SIS – which is a women’s rights organisation – launched an ambitious research project in late 2007. Its findings are now coming in.
Working with academics from three universities, the research has completed about 1 500 qualitative and quantitative questionnaires from across all 12 states of peninsular Malaysia, along with dozens of in-depth interviews. The research may make a significant contribution to global analysis of polygamy because unlike most studies that focus on the impact on wives, this study is also interviewing husbands and children.
Preliminary findings from the SIS research show that many children of first wives report a strong negative emotional impact. Most reported neglect from the father once he married a second wife and more so when he started having children from her.
Particularly where fathers had more than two wives or more than 10 children, daughters and sons often claim their father can hardly recognise them. When they went to ask for pocket money or school fees, their father would look at them cluelessly and ask, “Which mother are you from?”.
Polygamy also negatively affects the relationship between children and their mothers, with the former resenting the mother for being unable to ensure the father does not neglect them or for becoming depressed and also neglecting their emotional needs.
Regardless of gender, they lack confidence in their own ability to have stable relationships because they have only experienced a family life filled with traumatic quarrels and resentment.
The children of second wives usually cope better because from birth, they know their father has another family.
The impact of polygamy on women has both economic and emotional aspects. A number of polygamous wives reported, “I might as well be a single mother.” Under current government welfare policy, a single mother (divorced or widowed) can apply for welfare support, but a polygamous wife, at least on paper, has a husband and cannot get that support.
Husbands also report that the first wife becomes sexually competitive and manipulative. One said, “Before I took another wife, our sexual relations had waned a bit, but as soon as I got married, she is making more demands and I’m getting exhausted and I think it’s affecting my heart problem.”
A second wife in Kelantan said, “He asked me to give him a massage in order to ‘revive’ him. Hell, I gave him such a good massage and he fell asleep and started snoring and that ‘thing’ would not even go up!”
The women quite openly discuss these problems. Although some of the interviews verge on the farcical, this should not detract from the fact that polygamous wives clearly suffer profound emotional and economic harm, two powerful grounds for future campaigning. But Malaysia may not yet be ready for a public discussion about the right to a satisfying sexual relationship, clearly also an issue in polygamous situations.
Far from the traditional Muslim ideal of a harmonious family with a male breadwinner providing all the family’s needs, the SIS research is revealing how polygamy leads to unstable and dysfunctional families and how the possibility of being 'just between wives' and avoiding economic harm is a myth.
Sources: www.opendemocracy.net and www.themalaysianinsider.com
