Click here for more extraordinarily upsetting pictures of women in Pakistan who have had acid thrown over them for (variously) refusing demands to marry, disagreeing with family members, and in one case, after being raped.These women now face hardship and social ostracism: their attackers' judgment that they were less-than, not-human, is now branded on their faces, and will be shared by so many whom they encounter.
And the people who do this, the people who enable it, the people who tolerate it, the people who excuse or apologise for it, the people who promote a culture which normalises treating women as second class or as rightfully directed by the will of their husbands, brothers, uncles or fathers?
Nothing. They go scot-free.
Since 1994, a Pakistani activist who founded the Progressive Women’s Association (www.pwaisbd.org) 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.”
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