CAIRO: Egyptian Minister of State for Family and Population Moushira Khattab expressed concern at the alarmingly high divorce rate in Egypt, pointing to the fact that 30 percent of divorce cases in the country take place in the first year of marriage. At a lecture Wednesday on the role of the family in decreasing crime at the National Center for Social and Criminological Research, Khattab said that this number — recently published by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) — is higher than the rate of domestic violence. The CAPMAS study also found that the majority of cases of newly married couples filing for divorce are in Cairo and Alexandria, while the lowest numbers have been recorded in South Sinai. A couple gets divorced in Egypt every six minutes while 250,000 women resort to courts every year to pursue a divorce case, said Azza Suleiman, chair of the Center for Egyptian Women's Legal Aid (CEWLA). Khattab added that there are 5 million postponed divorce cases at the moment and 13 million cases under consideration by the Egyptian Personal Status courts. In a study released by Cabinet's Information and Decision Support Center (IDSC) released last January, female respondents placed the optimum age for marriage at 21-22 and the average marriage age for women in 2008 was 24. In the conservative Egyptian culture, there is a stigma associated with divorce, especially divorced woman, as they are frowned upon by society and are perceived as failures. The staggering statistics have triggered the launch of Motalakat Radio (Divorcees Radio), an online radio station aiming “to build a bridge between the divorced woman and a community that has empathy towards the pain she is enduring [and the station] and to be a medium through which she can interact and help people in order to have a more tolerant and positive society,” according to their official website. The radio station targets all members of the family, including men and children, to raise awareness of the fact that divorced women are no different from other female family members.
