Divorced by text message in Tajikistan
“Talaq, talaq, talaq”. In Tajikistan, those three words make up a much-feared text message when a man gone abroad decides to divorce his wife
Arabic for divorce, ‘talaq’, is usually uttered in person three times by the husband to initiate the process of divorce under Islamic law.
But a growing number of Tajik women are receiving the words phrased in a text message from their husbands who are off to earn a living in neighboring Russia. A group of reporters, who took part in the IMS-supported network for investigative journalists SCOOP Russia, set out to investigate the details of the trend.
“People were saying that my husband had a new wife and even a child. Malicious rumors! My husband’s not like that, I thought. He couldn’t behave like that with me, I thought”, says Sarvinoz, a Tajik woman who got married in 2006 to a man she thought would be her husband for many years to come.
“I got an SMS from him that very same evening. He wrote that he was leaving me. And as confirmation of the seriousness of his intentions, like thunder in a clear sky, [he wrote] three words, ‘Talaq, talaq, talaq!'”
Migrant workers arriving in Russia for work are often the only breadwinners for their families left behind in their homeland, where the average salary is a fraction of that in Russia. Various estimates suggest that nearly 1 million Tajik migrant workers are currently living abroad.
According to the International Organisation for Migration, one in three Tajiks who leave for Russia to find work, never return home. One of them was Sarvinoz’s husband.
Read the full investigation of Tajikistan’s text message divorces and the consequences for the women left behind.
More investigations in the making
The investigation in Tajikistan was conducted last year under the auspices of the IMS-supported SCOOP Russia network for investigative journalists in Northwest Russia.
SCOOP Russia recently launched its next round of investigations with a training of 16 journalists on everything from the legal basics of investigative journalism, access to information and how to work with sources.
Their investigations are due for publication in October 2012.
