3/11/2003: Bangladeshi acid burn victims

These women are rallying for International Women's Day, because they are acid burn victims.

You see, in Bangladesh there is a practice of throwing acid at young women. Generally this is done by their jilted lovers. Last year there were 485 such events. It's so common that there is now a Bangladesh Acid Survivor Foundation.

Disturbing and haunting.

Hooray for civilization.

Having travelled through India and seeing firsthand the results of a society that permits (although it is out of favour) the disfigurement and in some cases the killing of wives by their husbands (or their family upon the death of the husband), I still find images like this shocking and horrific.

How petty and insecure do these men have to be to inflict such carnage on someone that jilted them? If that's the way they are, the women made a good choice, unfortunately with horrible consequences.

I wonder if these men are even brought up on charges of assault?

How do you give yourself permission to violate someone that way? Every time these women meet someone new face to face, its burn victim, then person.

Hey, with any luck, they'll be able to get face transplants!

If ever there was a crime for which the punishment should be having the perpetrator's genitalia placed in a car door and and allowing the victim to kick it shut, this is the one.

Their eyes seem reasonably intact. A testament, I suppose, to reflexive eyelid shutting.