Focus on continuing violence against women

Lying on a bed at Pakistan's Institute for Medicine and Science (PIMS) in the capital, Islamabad, Manzoora Bibi was still in shock and could hardly talk, six months after her husband took a knife to her face and cut her nose off after she argued with him. "I don't want the police to know what happened, I am lucky to be alive, but I fear for my children," she told IRIN. The 32-year-old mother of three will spend another three months in hospital before her nose is reconstructed to an acceptable level and she is able to leave. Her case was taken up by the state-run crisis centre for women in Islamabad, who are providing her with medical and legal aid if she chooses to take her husband to court. "This is animalistic behaviour. There is no other way to describe this," manager of the crisis centre, Zaman Islam, told IRIN, adding that she had dealt with four such cases over the past two years. While admitting that there were many other cases like Manzoora's, she said that most don't come to light as women are too afraid to come forward and are often not permitted by the husband to seek treatment. "Men do this to disfigure the women. They think people will laugh at her and mock her to teach her a lesson. This truly is sick behaviour," she maintained. Another common method used to disfigure and injure women is burning them with kerosene or acid. This is a highly sensitive issue which is not being tackled properly by the government, according to women's NGOs in the country. "We have objectified women in this country to the point where she is just a chair, pencil - anything but a human being," director of the Progressive Women's Association (PWA) in Islamabad, Shanaz Bokhari told IRIN. "Men who do this are not mentally ill, or not that frustrated that he would burn a human being to ashes, there is no reason for this. This is also forbidden in Islam but it still happens," she added. Statistics for burn victims are distorted as many cases go unreported and the only reliable way is the collection of data from hospitals by various NGOs. In the year 2000, 295 cases of burning were reported by PWA. Of these, some 33 percent of the victims were pregnant, 68 percent were below the age of 18 and 60 percent were killed in the name of honour, by a family member. However, in this South Asian nation only two percent of perpetrators were convicted. "The reason for a low conviction rate is because there are mysteriously never any witnesses and you can't trace fingerprints once the body is burned," she explained. The first burn victim to be acknowledged in Pakistan was Zainab Noor in 1994, also one of the most horrific cases ever seen by Bokhari. "My God it was the worst I've ever seen. She was like a piece of charcoal lying there with her eyes glaring out," she said holding her head in her hands. Previous to this, fatal cases of female burn victims were recorded as accidental death and were often not investigated at all. She cited the case of a 16-year-old girl called Nagina who was tied to a pillar by her brothers and doused in kerosene and then set alight. All for talking to a boy while she went to fetch some water, she explained. The boy helped her to put a bucket of water on her head so that she could carry it home. Bokhari told of the day that the brothers felt that their honour was at stake so they set her alight and turned the radio on full blast so that Nagina's screams could not be heard. Within seconds she was burned alive. During a visit to Nagina's village following the tragic event, police officers were refusing to take the case on board until they stopped to ask directions and a shopkeeper identified Nagina as the one who was burned by her brothers. Filing a case with the police is a task in itself as it is a big source of bribery for them and the cases don't reach the judiciary, NGOs maintain. Even if cases do reach the courts, men still get away with it because most judges are men and they are less sympathetic to women. Highlighting the scale of the problem, according to PWA, there are around 30 burns victims in hospitals in Islamabad and its twin city Rawalpindi every month. "The majority of burn victims do not survive very long," she stressed, adding that the problem was also not confined to the lower classes of society. "I have dealt with cases from very educated upper middle class families too," she said. Over the past 10 years PWA has dealt with 14,000 cases of domestic violence of which more than 4,000 were women burned either by their husbands or a family member. The data was collected from only two hospitals in the capital and there was a 97 percent death rate. Violence plays a major role in keeping women suppressed and economically exploited preventing them from standing up for their own rights, women's rights advocates say. "I started investigating burn cases in 1994 because I was suspicious of why there were so many female victims who had died after cookers had blown up allegedly," she said. "I've followed more than 4,000 cases now and I've not seen one faulty stove which has blown up," she maintained. Even after the deadly act is carried out women are still blamed, she lamented. "If a woman is burned it is automatically assumed that she was having an affair or she did something wrong. This is just horrendous," she maintained. Although NGOs believe the present government was more active than others in tackling women's issues, they say much more needs to be done. "I want to open a burns centre. There is an urgent need for this but I am not getting any support from the government," she lamented. Asked if this problem could ever be eradicated she replied: "These evils can only be thrown out of our society only if our government concentrates and gives full attention by not only propagating but by helping us side by side and making sure cases are thoroughly investigated." At present there are no domestic violence laws in this country of 140 million people. When a girl is married into a family she is alone. If anything happens to her she often has no witnesses and therefore no legal case. There is also a need for more safe shelters for women in this country, according to women's rights campaigners. Burning of women act originates from India, where religion permits widows to be burned alive so that they do not go astray, according to PWA, and the problem is very much at large across South Asia. The Islamabad Crisis Centre receives at least two cases of women being burned by their husbands every month. Most are from the area of Jhelum and Rawalpindi in the central Punjab Province. The most common reason is because the husband does not want to live with the woman anymore and wants to disfigure her to make her unattractive to other men and stop her from remarrying, Islam explained. The most common methods used are setting women alight by pouring kerosene, pushing them onto an open flame, perhaps a cooker and using an iron to burn, according to staff at the crisis centre. "This is an extreme act of violence against women and it is usually too late before we can do anything," Islam maintained. "There should be education for boys in schools on this subject, especially in the rural areas," she added.