Acid Attack on Girls
- In
- 04:40 PM, Sep 11, 2015
- Anita Ayela
‘A café in Agra hires only Acid Victims’-A post on Facebook and 23,000 likes and 13,000 shares for that. That infuriated me! Actually, ‘infuriated’ is a very mild word for what I am feeling right now. It is a big hatred towards the world that I have boiling inside of me!
I know that the café run by 5 women, ’Acid survivors’ as they call themselves is a noble deed, indeed! It is nice to know that somewhere, one acid victim, Reshma, has opened make-up classes for other victims. Some women from this Agra Sheroes Cafe have modeled for calendars to re-define beauty and reach out to the public. I appreciate all this; I salute to the brave ladies. But my eyes look at all this in a different way. It is sad that we have to have them make news to notice them. The basic question here should be, “Why do we have Acid Victims in the first place?”
How can anybody in their right minds do such a ghoulish act? The attackers are definitely mentally sick. A lot of these acid attacks are gender biased and hence the victims are usually found to be female. Every girl, every woman is beautiful in her own way. People should just love this beautiful creation of God. Trying to possess this beauty or to own this beauty should never be the case.
“She wore provoking clothes but didn’t agree to my sexual advances”. The cheek of any boy or man to say that!!The attacker uses acid to retaliate against the girl’s refusal of sexual advances. How desperate can a man get? Is sex so important that he threaten a girl with acid in hand? Is he so sick that to satisfy his ego, he attack a girl with acid?
“She was friendly with me but didn’t love me and so I threatened her with acid”. When do people learn that to get love, love is used not acid? The misogynist society teaches men to treat women as objects and that is where this whole thing begins. Men always think that they have an upper hand and can get any girl they want for sexual pleasures. This very low grade mental make up of some men is the root cause of these acid attacks. When a girl refuses man’s advances or says no to his love, the man’s ego is hurt and he pours acid on her face and body. When asked why he did it, you would often hear, “She asked for it!” Asked for it, really?!!
Another reason for acid attacks is money. Money is so important in small countries or in countries with large populations. And the social ‘outlaw’, as I call it, is the system of ‘dowry ‘in countries like India. Acid attacks and deaths are also the outcome of unavailability or non-payment of dowry. How low can a man stoop as to sell himself to his wife’s parents in marriage? Yes, ‘dowry’ is nothing but a man’s rate or price that is set on himself to get married! And when the dowry doesn’t get to the boy on time, he thinks of acid. A girl in Mehboobnagar, India, died in the hospital after her husband made her drink acid as he didn’t get the money promised.
It is not just in India, there are acid victims in Bangladesh, UK, Columbia and US too. The acids commonly used in these attacks are nitrous acid, Sulfuric acid and hydrochloric acids. What is the government of all these countries doing? Why are these acids sold for peanuts and that too, over the counter? Shouldn’t these sales be banned? Shouldn’t one have a written permission or a doctor’s prescription to buy these?
The feminist groups, the women’s liberal groups, the NGOs, everyone talks about solving a lot of women’s problems. They claim that they would get the right to equality for women in the society. But my question is, do they do anything for women at all? Where are these groups when an acid attack is happening? Where are they when the law is not improving to support these women? Why are they silent when an acid attack victim is not able to get proper treatment because she can’t afford it? And what are all these men, these acid attackers doing in courts and prisons? Shouldn’t they be dead by now?
The law against acid attacks has to be tightened. Since Bangladesh passed the law of death penalty for Acid attackers, the rate of acid attacks has significantly decreased. In Iran, ‘an eye for an eye’ was the punishment given to some acid attackers. Acid was poured into the attacker’s eyes in prison to blind him. Somewhere in the world, if one woman pours acid down her attacker’s pants, that is not enough. Whatever be the reason, acid attacks are heinous crimes, worse than murder. The punishment for acid attacks should be no less than the punishment for murder.
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