Significantly most of the female suicides recorded in Herat, about 60 miles from the border with Iran, were educated women, including several nurses and teachers. That seems true of Mallali. She had completed high school in Kabul and Iran before being married off to live in a remote village. For 10 years she suffered her in-laws' abuses, too loyal to complain but, ultimately, too sensitive to endure them.
She must have been suffering terribly, because she wasn't worried about the pain. Afghanistan's constitution gives equal rights to men and women. But despite an increase in the number of girls in school, most Afghan women enjoy no more rights than they did under the Taliban.
Most of the country is not controlled by the government but by warlords as misogynistic as the Taliban. Death by burning: the only escape for desperate Afghan women. James Astill in Kabul finds a disturbing rise in suicides despite the fall of the misogynist Taliban. Reuse this content. Fairtrade America. Matt Simon.
Fred Pearce. Dan Friedman. David Corn. Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox. By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use , and to receive messages from Mother Jones and our partners.
Can you pitch in a few bucks to help fund Mother Jones' investigative journalism? We're a nonprofit so it's tax-deductible , and reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget. We noticed you have an ad blocker on. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter. Subscribe to our magazine. Shayma Amini, 33, is a nurse in a burn unit at Herat Regional Hospital.
In the first six months of alone, the hospital treated 69 cases. The hospital staff believes the real number of cases in any given year to be much higher; many victims die before reaching the hospital, and many more refuse to admit to burning themselves. Shayma Amini, a burn unit nurse, treats Shereen, a teenager burned on 45 percent of her body. Shereen claims the burns are the result of an accident. This woman set herself on fire after her father accused her of sleeping with a man out of wedlock.
Burns covered 90 percent of her body. She died less than 24 hours after hospital arrival. A nurse and a relative attend to a self-immolation case—a young woman who died the next day. When asked if she's married, Taranah knows better than to answer herself. She looks to her mother-in-law, who answers on her behalf. The meat, mixed with the water from the cooker and the flame of the fire, burned most of her body.
In the corner of an adjacent room, a cavernous silence is broken only by the constant beeping of a heart monitor. Wrapped in a layer of thick blankets, teenage Zahra pretends to be asleep, closing her eyes whenever strangers walk past. With her hair in a hospital-mandated scrub hat, her small, round face is all that peeks out into the world.
Her story begins like all the others. A young girl who set herself on fire on her wedding night, a claim her relatives deny. But unlike other self-immolation victims, Zahra's in-laws didn't bring her to the hospital right away. Instead, when they heard about what happened, they took the year old girl from her home to her new home — her conjugal home.
Rather than spending her wedding night with a man she loved, she spent it in wretched, painful agony, her cries for help ignored. When the night was over, her in-laws brought her to the hospital the following day. It wasn't supposed to be this way. After the fall of the Taliban, foreign governments flooded Afghanistan with aid and infrastructure, with promises that women's rights would be protected.
It was hailed as a landmark, for the first time criminalizing long-standing and long-defended cultural practices like forced and child marriages, domestic violence and abuse, and rape.
Men who broke the law were supposed to be charged, tried, and convicted in impartial courts of law. It was a glimmer of hope. Even in an often male-dominated society, women had their rights enshrined in Afghan law. Today, according to the United Nations, only 35 percent of all criminal charges filed under the EVAW ever make it to a trial.
In most cases, women are pressured to drop the case. According to the United Nations, the law simply isn't being applied the way it was meant to. The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commision found more than 4, cases of violence against women over a seven month period, from March to October this year. It's a sharp increase from the nearly 2, cases they recorded over an entire month period the year before. Some experts suggest the sharp rise is due to better and more accurate reporting of incidents, and that the overall amount of violence hasn't changed.
Others, including the authors of the U.
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