Acid Attacks Condemn Pakistan Women to Life of Pain
By Tahir Ikram
AHMEDPUR SHARQIA (Reuters) - Shaheena moans in pain as the fierce summer heat sears her skin. She can no longer see and her once pretty face is horrifically disfigured.
The 15-year-old from Punjab province is one of the hundreds of Pakistani women who fall victim each year to acid attacks perpetrated by jealous husbands or rejected suitors or as plain acts of revenge.
For many victims, death would be less painful than living with pain and the humiliation of disfigurement.
Shaheena's nightmare began when the husband of her elder sister, Sakeena, threw acid over them after an argument in November. Sakeena suffered 70 percent burns but her face was largely spared.
Shaheena was hit full in the face and blinded. Her wounds have still not properly healed and a terrible burning sensation returns every day with a maddening itching.
"I wish I had died that day," Sakeena said in the one-room house in which they live in the small town of Ahmedpur Sharqia, 330 miles south of Islamabad.
"I was sitting with my sister. He just stood there and looked at us for two minutes and then poured the acid."
She said her sister's life had been ruined. "Who will marry her in this condition? Who will take her? Her face has been destroyed."
The pain of their injuries is bad enough, but the sisters have worse worries. Sakeena's husband is in prison awaiting trial, but they still have to live in his house.
They have nowhere else to go and are under constant pressure from his relatives to drop the charge against him and preserve their marriage.
"I have no brother, no father," Sakeena said. "The whole family is behind him, urging us to settle. They say what has happened has happened, forgive him and return to your life."
Rights activists say acid attacks are among the worst of the huge numbers of crimes against women committed in Pakistan, a male-dominated Islamic state where the human rights commission estimates a woman is raped every two hours.
"MOST BRUTAL"
"Burning is the most brutal crime," said Shahnaz Bukhari, head of the Progressive Women's Association, a non-governmental organization helping acid burn victims.
"If a woman survives, she is alienated from society, children look at her as if she is an ugly witch."
Bukhari blamed "this possession feeling in our society."
"The phenomena ingrained in our males' minds is that 'I am God on Earth'."
The rights commission says as well as huge numbers of rapes hundreds of women fall victim every year to "honor killings" in which close male relatives kill a woman to avenge perceived shame she has brought to the family.
This can range from having an affair to choosing a husband without the family's consent.
Many die or are terribly injured in what are described as "accidents" with kerosene cooking stoves.
Madadgaar, a joint venture of Lawyers for Human Rights and the United Nations (news - web sites) Children Fund, recorded 4,485 cases of violence against women in Pakistan in 2002, including murder, rape, burning and physical and sexual abuse.
The figures are compiled from media reports and activists say they are a fraction of the actual number.
Rape can be considered a dishonor on a family so often goes unreported.
"The issue of rape, the issue of incest, child sexual abuse is not talked about," said Bukhari, who has been urging victims to narrate their stories and challenge perpetrators.
But this is easier said than done.
An hour's drive from Sakeena live Mariam Bibi, 45, and her daughter-in-law Nazeeran Mai, 30, who were gang-raped on May 8 in their house in the impoverished village of Pati Kheiara.
They were each raped by three men, and say they receive daily threats from one of the suspects, even though he is in police custody.
Bukhari said violence against women was rampant because of an absence of specific laws against domestic violence and loopholes in existing laws. Also, police implementation of laws was ineffective.
Under traditional Islamic law employed in the countryside, four witnesses are needed to convict a person of rape and there are no laws at all against wife-beating.
"We need proper legislation and implementation of the legislation," Bukhari said. |
