| This Resource Kit provides ideas and strategies to help with education and advocacy campaigns promoting equality and justice in family laws and practices. Each of the main sections addresses one specific area of family laws. Each section suggests support and justifications for why equality and justice in the family are possible for that area from four different perspectives: (1) religion; (2) universal human rights; (3) guarantees of rights in national constitutions, laws and policies; and (4) social realities. In addition, each section offers examples of provisions or practices from different countries that are more just or equal for men and women.
Muslim family laws and practices differ greatly from country to country. There are differences in specific provisions and practices, differences in the historical and social context in which they developed, and differences in how they are viewed by the public, the Government, religious figures, and civil society.
Similarly, advocacy and law reform in different countries and communities will be very different depending on the needs, background and context of the situation. When using the information and justifications provided in this Kit, you should keep the context and audience in mind. In some contexts, it will be more important to stress the religious justifications in conjunction with the social realities instead of the human rights justifications. In other situations, the religious and human rights arguments will need to be brought together in a unified fashion. In other environments, it will be most important to stress human rights arguments and the social realities and not the religious justifications. However, Musawah is grounded in a holistic framework that balances all four levels of support for equality and justice – religion, human rights, fundamental rights guarantees in domestic laws, and social realities. All are important in women’s and men’s lives in the 21st century.
In addition, in many cases this Kit provides general information or a broad justifications for equality and justice in the family. To be effective in different contexts, more specific data or information from that context should be used. For instance, support for an equal minimum age of marriage that is older than puberty includes the fact that girls who marry at a younger age are more likely to drop out of school, which can hinder their intellectual and employment potential, and are more likely to have children at a younger age, which raises physical, mental and emotional health concerns. In using these arguments, you could include statistics from your context about the number of early marriages, school drop out rates for girls and boys, maternal mortality rates for girls and boys, divorce rates for early marriages, etc.
Finally, this Kit has been designed to allow individual sections to be reproduced and distributed. For instance, if you are working on equal right to divorce, you can print the pages that provide those justifications.
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