Rights activist hails jail term for wife-beater

Manama: Women's rights activist Ghada Jamsheer on Thursday hailed a court decision to jail a wife-beater as "a right step to end an endemic plight".

"I applaud the decision because it will certainly help to put an end to the widespread phenomenon of battering women," Jamsheer told Gulf News.

"What is needed is that more people become involved in the drive to minimise and eliminate domestic violence," she said.

Jamsheer was commenting on a three-month sentence handed by a local judge against a Gulf national who broke the arm of his Bahraini wife and mother of their seven children for refusing to have intercourse with him.

According to press sources, the court case papers said the wife reported her husband to the public prosecutor after he abused her physically and broke her arm.

The wife said that her husband became infuriated after she told him that she could not have proper physical contact with him because she was menstruating.

But the husband refused to be put off by the wife's claims and insisted that marital relation was a right granted by God and he wished to exercise his right.

The argument between the spouses developed into a fight and the husband started beating his wife until he broke her arm.

The husband, who does not live in Bahrain but makes regular visits there, told the judge that he had a divine right to beat his wife whenever she disobeyed him.

The unimpressed judge said that the man would have to pay 300 Bahraini dinars (Dh2,926) if he wanted to avoid jail.