most common, the unregistered customary union. These unregistered customary marriages are not registered officially with any government agency or local officials. Without any official record of the marriage, a widow who wants to make a claim to property that was held in the marriage but is formally owned by the late husband (or members of his family) has to demonstrate that she was indeed married to him. Doing so is tricky because the courts can require confirmation from the widow’s in-laws, who are the very people who stand to benefit if the marriage is not confirmed. Not surprisingly, many of the widows Human Rights Watch interviewed said their in-laws were unwilling to provide such confirmation. No fewer than two thirds of the women who spoke to Human Rights Watch said they experienced the profound injustice of their in-laws taking over their homes or property, and feeling helpless to stop it. Others simply did not know that they had property and inheritance rights to begin with and were unable to withstand the intimidation tactics used by their in-laws such as daily shaming, harassment, and physical assaults. Others said that they were wary of jeopardizing relationships with in-laws with whom they had shared their lives for many years, and whom they had hoped would support them and their children in familial and cultural ways. Widows who decided to mount legal fights to keep their property told Human Rights Watch that they faced major barriers doing so. They described an array of procedural and practical hurdles. They said that they had to travel long distances to reach government agencies and courts; that correspondence about claims was often sent to family members of their late husbands, who had little interest in sharing it with them; and that court fees were prohibitive. Being stripped of their only means of income (the United Nations estimates that over 70 percent of women are involved in the agricultural economy in Zimbabwe), these widows also faced a catch-22 situation: they needed proceeds from their property to pay the cost of proceedings, and they needed to pay for the proceedings in order to get back their property. Almost all of the women we interviewed who successfully reclaimed their property were assisted by nongovernmental organizations. Without this legal support, the barriers appear insurmountable for most widows. Widows also face strong social pressure to accept property-grabbing by in-laws, some of which, families assert, derives from interpretations of customary laws. Some families “YOU WILL GET NOTHING” 4