Saudi Gazette report

JEALOUSY has been part and parcel of every woman’s character. Most women shower the men they love with so much care and affection. As a result, they tend to be overprotective and possessive, which leads to jealousy that in some cases could lead to fatal consequences.

Many women have committed serious crimes because of being intensely jealous, such that their possessiveness might have blinded them to reason and caused their imagination to soar, before committing the crimes. However, acute jealousy has made many men lose their ability to see reason and end up being involved in horrendous crimes.

According to psychiatrists who spoke to Al-Riyadh newspaper, jealousy is a passion that can push a person to any levels. It can push the person to the extreme and make him or her to kill the one they love. The person either loses it after a series of drip-drip doses of jealousy that breaks the person, or a one-off blind rage sparked by jealousy puts the person in a veritable spot, like the recent event where a woman poured boiling oil on her husband after she came to know that he had married a second time.

Etedal Muhammad, a housewife, said any woman who has spent a long part of her life with her husband, only to discover that he has married a second wife will probably feel frustrated and completely disappointed, especially if she has sacrificed many things for her husband and has provided him with all the means of comfort and assisted him climb the career ladder. “However, these are not enough reasons or justifications for murder or revenge,” she added.

“I completely understand how some women lose it and decide to take revenge on their husbands because they feel they have been stabbed in the back. The feeling of betrayal is bitter even if the husband has married a second woman legally and according to the Shariah rules,” she said.

On the other hand, some men who suffer from intense jealousy might resort to extreme methods to monitor every step a wife takes. They might install surveillance cameras in the house just to know what their wives are doing when they are alone. She cited the story of the man who killed his wife because she filed for divorce.

“He could not accept the fact that she wanted divorce for his controlling attitude and jealousy and was faithful to him despite his efforts to monitor her actions. He was acutely jealous and could not control himself and was blinded into this extreme step,” Etedal said.

Mona Attiya, a female teacher, believes that women jealousy can lead to more fatal consequences than when men are jealous because women are more emotional than men while men, in majority of cases, tend to use reason in such situations.

“I have read about several crimes that showed that women can inflict serious damage to men if jealousy takes over them,” she added

Dr. Majed Qanash, psychiatric consultant, stressed that jealousy can lead someone to kill, especially if it controls the mind of the person. This can be due to some slight psychological imbalance. A person who feels intensely jealous is not a sick person from the psychiatric point of view, rather, this person loses control and stops using reason and logic to decide wrong from right. As a result, they take extreme steps, some even end up killing the person they love. Usually, women have a higher degree of jealousy than men do because women are possessive, while men are domineering.

Sometimes siblings can feel jealous of one another because the way their parents treat them. The parents might favor one of their sons over another, which is wrong and can lead to fatal consequences.

Qanash mentioned the story of a seven-year-old boy who killed his baby brother because he felt jealous of him. Qanash called upon parents to treat their children equally.