Acid attacks
Violence Against Women
[Horrific photos of Muslim male violence against
women]
Terrorism that's personal (12 images) Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times
op-ed columnist who traveled to Pakistan last year to write about acid attacks,
put it this way in an essay at the time: “I’ve been investigating such acid
attacks, which are commonly used to terrorize and subjugate women and girls in a
swath of Asia from Afghanistan through Cambodia (men are almost never attacked
with acid). Because women usually don’t matter in this part of the world, their
attackers are rarely prosecuted and acid sales are usually not controlled. It’s
a kind of terrorism that becomes accepted as part of the background noise in the
region. ...
“Bangladesh has imposed controls on acid sales to curb such attacks, but
otherwise it is fairly easy in Asia to walk into a shop and buy sulfuric or
hydrochloric acid suitable for destroying a human face. Acid attacks and wife
burnings are common in parts of Asia because the victims are the most voiceless
in these societies: They are poor and female. The first step is simply for the
world to take note, to give voice to these women.” Since 1994, a Pakistani
activist who founded the Progressive Women’s Association to help such women “has
documented 7,800 cases of women who were deliberately burned, scalded or
subjected to acid attacks, just in the Islamabad area. In only 2 percent of
those cases was anyone convicted.”