Ali Al-Qassimi
Several news stories of young women running away from home have recently been published in local dailies. There are usually no follow-up stories about what happened to them. Usually when a young woman runs away, her parents will report her to the police who will find her and bring her back home. Nobody studies the reasons why these women prefer to run away rather than live with their parents.
We do not know where they hide, with whom they run away and how long they have been hiding. We read these stories and do not even think about discussing solutions to this problem. In fact, we regard such acts as a social disgrace and stigma that should be treated with full confidentiality.
Academics have so far not researched this issue. Police stations are not doing anything in this regard as well. All they do is search for the runaways and bring them back to their torturers and the home they hate. Some men are cruel to women in our society.
A young woman would not run away just for the love of it; there are reasons and causes but no one wants to focus on them and study them. The painful thing is that some parents and families refuse to go to the police station and pick up the young women who ran away from unhappy and miserable homes.
They ran away because they were frustrated, tired of being abused and believed that living on the street was better than living with their own families.
When are we going to study the reasons and causes of this issue and when are we going to hold fathers, brothers, husbands and even lovers accountable for the behavior of these young women. Who is going to guarantee runaways their rights and promise them that they will never be abused again if they return home? Most stories about runaways indicate that they are the result of emotional and domestic abuse.
Perhaps the concerned authorities are studying this issue but what are the results and statistics. We want to hear the truth, no matter how painful, with no sugarcoating. We are ready to hear the results.
This issue should be studied thoroughly and solutions to this problem should be found. This should not be treated as a social disgrace. The real disgrace is when a young woman commits suicide because she cannot take it anymore. This would be a real discredit for our society. Do we prefer that young women commit suicide instead of running away from home? Does society believe that a runaway young woman is a disgrace while suicide will end her suffering and protect her family from being socially dishonored?
