Afghan Girls Burn Themselves to Escape Forced "Arranged" Marriage

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Thread started 10/29/09 9:54am

XxAxX

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Afghan Girls Burn Themselves to Escape Forced "Arranged" Marriage

http://worldblog.msnbc.ms...12069.aspx

this girl is SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD

Seventeen-year-old Shirin had been brought to the Herat Regional Hospital Burns Unit a few days before we met her. Ninety percent of her body was covered in third-degree burns.

Her mother-in-law said Shirin had burned herself by accident. The girl was preparing a meal in the kitchen but somehow confused cooking gasoline with petrol, she said.

how could someone's mother in law perpetuate a lie like that? how shameful

But Dr. Mohamed Aref Jalali, the director of the burns unit, said Shirin told him in private that she had set herself on fire deliberately after fighting with her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law.

Many girls in Afghanistan think self-immolation is the best solution for family problems, according to Jalali.

"[For these girls], it’s no good to solve the problem with the father-in-law, with the mother-in-law," said the doctor. "They think self-immolation will solve the problem."

It’s a "solution" that appears to a major problem in Afghanistan, particularly among young women between the ages 13 and 25.

unfreaking believeable. 51 burn victims have been admitted to this hospital alone, but only 13 have survived.

"The forced marriage is the best reason and the important reason, and it starts from the economic problem," said Jalali.

Often in arranged marriages, women are viewed in very stark terms.

"She is here only to wash, to clean, to give baby…and nothing more," said Marie-Jose Brunel, a French volunteer nurse at the burns unit who was full of Gallic warmth and purposeful seriousness. "If they have no freedom, no possibility to study, to be considered like nothing, it’s very, very difficult."

i hope things change for them, and soon.

Domestic violence
Shirin was married two years ago when she was 15 years old. But another patient we found at the hospital, down the hall from Shirin, was Rezagul. Skinny and illiterate, the 13-year-old was married at 11 to a man who was almost 20 years older. He was abusive, she told us, beating her whenever she failed to do her housework. So did the other in-laws. "My cruel sister-in-law, brother-in-law, and husband…they beat me," she said.

i am really trying to understand how this could possibly be acceptable. is this a religion that i should try to open my mind to? a culture i should try to understand? i am having a hard time not condemning it, and its followers, and those who would permit this kind of abuse to occur.

Empress	Many women over this vast world are extremely brave. I don't know if I could ever survive a life like this and I don't ever want to find out. Some of these people are so backwards in their beliefs and so hung up on their religion that most of what they do (especially the way they treat their women) makes no sense to me at all.
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