Acid Victims in Pakistan

 

    By Ishrat Jahan

 

BACKGROUND INFORMATION     

 

            Throwing acid in the face of a person is an act that is meant to hurt someone both emotionally and mentally. It’s a detrimental crime that seems almost immoral of someone to do, but happens too often in places like Pakistan and India, or usually in areas where women aren't that powerful. Eighty percent of the time victims of acid throwing are always women, and are attacked for reasons like rejecting marriage proposals, not getting the right job, angering someone, or even being too beautiful. In Pakistan, there were 150 reports of acid throwing in just one year. The reason that there are so many attacks is because of how easy it is to get hold of acid, it is only a dollar a bottle. The question is why isn’t there a louder voice in regards to this issue? This is due to more often than not, victims are either too disfigured to do something about it, or are pressured into being silenced. Being in such countries with a patriarchal society, women are silenced from the beginning.

          One case of this horrible acid attack was reported by Sidra Yasmeen, who suffered an acid attack at the early age of thirteen. In her case, she was attacked by acid for not going to a place with her friends brother. Even in court, her father was threatened from several people to drop the case. Her acid attacks caused her whole face to become deformed. Yasmeen’s eyesight is all gone, her hair damaged, eyebrows that got several transplants, and had several surgeries done to her eyes and neck. In this case, the attackers were given jail time, but this outcome is extremely rare.

        Victims usually retract their case after several threats and public shaming, and usually do not even get the proper justice they deserve for such a horrific attack. Not only does society make things difficult to reach justice, the justice system itself also takes a long winded four years to allow the case to reach to court. Going through an acid attack is not a memory that can be suppressed by the brain. These attacks cause deep trauma, permanent physical scarring, and usually irreversible Post traumatic stress disorder. Most significantly; it changes the victims life for the worse as normalizing life is extremely difficult. Society refuses to accept people who are disfigured. It’s hard to get jobs, and some women even get disowned by their own family for merely being an unfortunate victim.

               In 2012, Pakistan passed a law that established a pathway for victims to seek justice. With extremely slow development, acid throwing was made a crime. However, this step forward was a illogical step backward for victims. In this law, the victims have to actually prove that the attacker was planning on killing them. This is difficult to do since the attacker can just defend him/herself by saying “if I wanted to kill that person, I would have just shot her.”

         Above all, there is a positive side. Since this law was established, the conviction of the acid attacker went up to about 18%. This is a drastic improvement, especially coming from a country where women are often belittled to mere commodity. To even have a law like this passed means that several women had to courageously fight society and get their voices heard. Even speaking up earns you an acid to the face. These women have courage. Tightening laws have really helped keep down the numbers of acid attacks while also giving courage for victims to speak up inherently increasing attacks reported. A way to decreasing the crime rate would be raising the prices of a bottle of acid as it would decrease numbers of acid attacks. However, truthfully this does not make a large dent in the solution but rather push aggressors to other methods of weapons. So the need to change societal perception is more important than limit aggressors. It is ALWAYS more important to prevent the birth of the mindset such attackers then prevent weapons reaching the attacker. Various solutions to this would be reforming education and changing cultural norms.

              Other methods that could help decrease this vicious crime would be to actually have harsher punishments against the attackers. Punishment for acid throwing is jail time. But this doesn't give back the life of the victim nor equate punishment with the gravity of the crime. The attackers are still able to eat, communicate, and walk with regular people in months or years time. However, acid victims have a difficult time fulfilling the basic needs as a human such as breathing or eating. By introducing harsher laws not only shows that the country has changed its way from conforming to a male centered society but also by putting a stand against the mere ideology and ignorance of attacking women.

 

 

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