The state government aspires to see the family institution become the backbone for community wellbeing, said Minister of Welfare, Community Well Being, Women, Family and Childhood Development Dato Sri Fatimah Abdullah.

With this in mind, Fatimah said her ministry had been organising marriage and parenting courses through the Women and Welfare Department for couples intending to get married.

“The backbone of community wellbeing is families that are strong, healthy and resilient. Parenting skills are also very important. We don’t have an institution where one can learn to be a parent. Most of us either learnt from books, especially the educated couples through magazines, books, Google, YouTube and so on or some may use their parents as a role model after finding their ways to be effective.

“That is how we learn, but the question is whether what we learnt is still relevant with the current environment as it has changed so much. We now have the social media and things that we had never seen during our time but now are available for our children. So how do we teach and protect our children when parenting in this ever-changing environment is getting more challenging?

“Through marriage and parenting courses like this, we are trying to help the community to obtain knowledge and skills. Hopefully it will be useful

and can strengthen the family institution that is different compared to last time,” she said when closing a Baitul Muslim and Till Jannah Marriage and Islamic Parenting programme at Pullman Hotel Kuching here yesterday.

Fatimah said the state government focused on strengthening the family institution in the state, after finding out that social problems like drug abuse, pregnancy out of wedlock, teenage pregnancy and divorce cases involving young couples were blamed on the family institution.

“If the family institution is strong, healthy, resilient with family members living peacefully together, we find that this type of family rarely produces troubled children, troubled kids or kids at risk. When we did a profile of these (troubled) children, we found that they were from families that were very fragile and some came from families where their parents divorced.”

Fatimah said based on the statistics obtained from the Sarawak Islamic Affairs Department (Jais) and National Registration Department (NRD), there were 13,270 divorce cases between 2010 and 2014 in Sarawak.

“From the total, 62 per cent involved Muslim couples while 5,055 or 38 per cent involved non-Muslims couples. These are those who had registered. There are marriages that were conducted using ‘adat’ (custom) that are not registered (with NRD). Marriage through adat is recognised in Sarawak but when the couples want to divorce, they have to go back to Majlis Adat Istiadat.”

“In 2010, the divorce cases among Muslim couples were 1,511, followed by 1,564 cases in 2011 and dropped a bit in 2012 with 1,536 cases but increased again to 1,739 in 2013 and 1,885 cases in 2014.

“As for the divorce cases involving non-Muslim couples, there were 793 cases in 2010, then increased to 916 cases in 2011, then to 1,039 in 2012, 1,101 in 2013 and 1,206 cases in 2014. The statistics show that the number of divorce cases had increased to more than 1,000 cases (over the years) for both Muslim and non-Muslim couples.”

She pointed out that the highest number of cases of divorce involved couples between the age of 18 and 40 years and those married for five years and below.

“The main reason for divorce is incompatibility, immaturity, irresponsible husband, intervention by the in-laws, financial problems and other reasons including domestic violence. For domestic violence, most of them can be connected to drug abuse problems and alcohol abuse (for non-Muslims).

“We also found out that depression is also among the reasons that can affect family wellbeing. If we see the result of National Health and Mobility Study conducted in 2015, depression (cases) were found to have multiplied.”

Fatimah hoped that the participants would share the knowledge and skills gained during the marriage and parenting course with family members, friends and neighbours in order to meet the state government’s aspiration to have families that are strong, healthy and resilient.

Among those present was state Women and Family Department director Noriah Ahmad.

Source:
courtesy of THE BORNEO POST

by BORNEO POST

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