<font color=brown>This article says that 7k women DIED from dowry murders and suicides in 1996. That was up from 4.6k in 1995. We have to assume that the disfiguring 'accidents' make up many thousands more. At the 1996 rate, in ten years, 70k women will have died from dowry murders and suicides.
India's Healthy Ministery found that half the married women in a 90k survey justified wife beating. In another survey of 10k, half said domestic violence was a normal way of life in India. You might want to click on the link and see some of the pics of disfigured women. They are much nicer that the real thing we saw on Dateline.
You're Indian friends may be very nice but how do you know what they do in the privacy of their own homes. And isn't Bangalore the hi tech capital from where so many Indians are emigrating to the Silicon Valley?
Frankly, Amy, I am surprised at your effort to make it seem like the issue has been over dramatized by American media.<font color=black>
ted
*****************************************************
December 26, 2000
Kerosene, Weapon of Choice for Attacks on Wives in India
By CELIA W. DUGGER
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Namas Bhojan for The New York Times
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BANGALORE, India — Every day, year after year, women grotesquely disfigured by fire are taken to Victoria Hospital's burn ward here in India's fastest-growing city. They lie in rows, wrapped like mummies in white bandages, their moans quieted by the pain-obliterating drip of morphine.
Typically, these women and thousands like them have been depicted as victims of disputes over the ancient social custom of dowry and as symbols of the otherness of India, a place where lovely young brides are doused with kerosene and set ablaze for failing to satisfy the demands of their husbands' families for gold, cash and consumer goods that come as part of the marriage arrangement.
But most women on the ward never mentioned dowry when explaining why they were burned. Some, like Radhamma, 25, described accidental injuries caused by cheap pump-action kerosene stoves that are often shoddily made and lack even the most basic safety features.
Others, like Geetha, 20, offered harrowing testimonies, supported by a growing body of new research, that place them right in the international mainstream of brutishly mistreated wives. The use of fire as a weapon, which seems so exotic, is simply expedient: kerosene, a ubiquitous cooking fuel here, is a cheap, handy weapon, much like a gun or a baseball bat in an American home.
Geetha, who like many south Indians has only one name, is a survivor on a ward where most die, but it would be hard to call her lucky.
As she related her story, she held her head immobile, barely moved her lips and turned only her dark eyes on a visitor to avoid stretching the raw, burned skin on her neck. Her wizened mother caressed her long brown hair, which spread out on a pillow like a mermaid's under water.
Geetha explained that she had been the pampered baby in a family of 10 children who had rarely been expected to cook or clean. Marriage was a rude shock.
Like most brides in India, Geetha moved in with her husband's family after an arranged marriage. That was in 1999. Within months, Geetha said, her husband and mother-in-law began beating her with whatever they could grab — a kitchen ladle, a broomstick, a stalk of sugar cane — because they believed that she was shirking her housekeeping duties.
"All the scoldings and beatings were to correct my mistakes," she said.
One morning her husband ordered her to do all the chores before he returned home to the slum where they live on the outskirts of Bangalore.
She sifted stones from the rice, fetched the water, washed the clothes and fed her husband's nephew. But she said she had not yet spread a dung mixture smoothly on the front step by the time he got home.
"I had done everything except this," she said. "But he was angry with me. He said I was lazy. He said if he could get another wife, she would do everything."
That afternoon, as she walked toward the kitchen, she said, she felt something splash on her back. Then she burst into flames. When she turned around, she saw her mother- in-law holding a kerosene can and her husband with a matchbox.
Her mother-in-law, Kempamma, a petite, gray-haired woman, and her husband, Kumar, a slight man with a sweet smile, denied that they had attacked Geetha. Rather, they said, Geetha poured the kerosene on herself in a suicide attempt.
Continued
1 | 2 | 3 | Next>>
nytimes.com |
