the effort to end acid violence

[niyad]

The Effort to End Acid Violence

April 8, 2011 by Shakthi Jothianandan ·

“This is a form of gender terrorism,” says Sital Kalantry, director of Cornell Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic. “If we deviate from what’s expected of us, this is the punishment that we receive.”

Kalantry, an associate clinical professor, is speaking of acid violence–when corrosive acid is thrown on women’s faces and bodies, sometimes killing victims or causing blindness or permanent disfigurement.

Acid attacks occur across the globe, from the United States to Uganda, but the practice is escalating in Bangladesh, India and Cambodia. With Jocelyn Getgen of the Virtue Foundation, Kalantry has published the first comparative study on acid violence in those nations. The culmination of nearly two years of on-the-ground fact-finding missions in each country, it paints a sobering portrait of the extent of the practice—hitherto underreported and extremely difficult to count. On a hopeful note, it also contains novel recommendations for combating the problem, including corporate accountability.

None of the governments in question keep records of acid attacks, so Kalantry, Getgen and their team had to rely on numbers from NGOs, news reports and court cases. According to Bangladesh’s Acid Survivors Foundation, since 1999, almost 2,500 attacks have left more than 3,000 victims in their wake. In 2010 alone, Bangladesh saw 115 attacks–its highest number in three years. The Cambodian Acid Survivors Charity cites 271 acid victims receiving treatment at hospitals in the past 15 years; a perusal of Indian newspaper articles yielded 153 reported instances of acid violence over the past 8 years. Not surprisingly, the general consensus among the report’s researchers is that acid attacks are underreported and that their data is at best a modest portrait of the breadth of this problem.

. . . .

http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2011/04/08/the-effort-to-end-acid-violence/

[KittyWampus]

1. Just read the article that basically suggests limiting availability of acid- I disagree

The problem is the screwed up culture that treats women as chattel. AS objects to be controlled.

This included the wearing of burqas.

[niyad]

2. but, until the culture can be changed, there has to be some kind of regulation and reporting.

and, as for treating women as chattel, that isn't a phenomenon limited to those cultures. witness the war on women being perpetrated by the reichwingfundies in this country.