When You’re an Adult but Don’t Control Your Life, Daily Brief July 18, 2023

Imagine being an adult who has to ask permission like a child for the most basic things. You can’t even leave your home or get a job without someone else’s approval.

Did you commit a crime, and this is a punishment?

No.

You’re simply a woman, that’s all.

A new report details how many Middle East and North African countries still prevent women from moving freely within their own country without the permission of a male guardian. Some also similarly block women from freely obtaining a passport and travelling abroad.

In many instances, your male guardian – typically your father, brother, or husband – dominates your life.

Say, for example, you’re a woman studying at a university in Bahrain, Iran, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, or the United Arab Emirates, and you want to go on a field trip with your class. Several state universities require permission of your male guardian to go. Same with staying or leaving campus accommodation.

In some countries, women also face discrimination trying to rent apartments or stay in hotels if they are not married or do not have a male guardian’s permission.

In short, you’re an adult, but you don’t control your life.

Marriage can be grossly unequal. Fifteen countries in the region still apply personal status or family laws that require women to either “obey” their husbands, live with them, or seek their permission to leave the marital home, work, or travel. Courts can order women to return to their marital homes or lose their right to spousal maintenance from their husbands.

In addition, in Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, women can be arrested, detained, or forced to return home if male guardians report them “absent.” 

Authorities often claim these rules are for women’s protection.

But as my colleague and HRW senior women’s rights researcher, Rothna Begum, says, all these rules and restrictions on movement, “deprive women of their rights and enable men to control and abuse them at will.”

To be clear, there are also male guardianship policies outside the Middle East, and these laws in the region do not exist in isolation. They have been influenced by a broader history of laws and traditions around the world, including European legal traditions, that gave or still give men control over women’s lives.

But none of that changes the key point: these policies are discriminatory and wrong.

Women in the region have been fighting ceaselessly to get governments to eliminate these restrictions on their freedom of movement and all male guardianship rules. They deserve everyone’s full support.

Because why should any adult need another adult’s permission to leave the home?