Acid Attacks

Definition & Prevalence

An acid attack is a deliberate act of violence involving the act of throwing, spraying, or pouring acid or a similarly corrosive substance onto the body of another with the intent to disfigure, maim, or torture.[1] Attackers usually attack with hydrochloric, sulfuric, or nitric acid, which quickly burns through flesh and bone.[2] Different from crimes committed with the intention to kill victims, acid attacks are meant to distort a person’s physical appearance, demonstrated by the fact that the face and neck are the prime targets in such attacks.[3] While acid attacks have become prevalent in the United Kingdom in recent years, developing countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and India annually report the highest number of incidents of acid violence.[4] While local newspapers and nonprofits, such as the Acid Survivors Foundation, track cases of acid attacks in developing countries, the government does not keep official statistics, and there are likely more attacks than the data reveals. Men and women are victims of acid attacks, but women are targeted at significantly higher rates, particularly in developing countries.

Causes & Contributing Factors

Acid violence is prevalent largely because of the affordability and accessibility of acid.[5] Motives behind acid attacks vary from country to country. In the United Kingdom, attacks are often committed by young gangs against a male with the motive of racial bias. In developing countries, acid attacks are frequently identified as crimes of passion, committed by men against women after refusals of marriage proposals, if a woman is caught engaging in an extramarital affair, if a woman rejects unwanted sexual advances, and as the result of dowry disputes.[6] It is also common for wives to attack her husband’s mistress to break up their extramarital relationship and ensure her own social and economic security.[7]

Consequences

Survivors of acid attacks are left with physical, psychological, and social scars. Along with the immediate and severe pain inflicted by acid attacks, victims often suffer facial disfigurement, hair loss, blindness, and the destruction of nasal cartilage.[8] Disfigurement of the face and other physical scars of acid attacks often stigmatize victims in modern society, resulting in social exclusion from communities, decreased job opportunities, and decreased relationship opportunities.[9] This social ostracization often leaves victims facing severe psychological battles from extreme isolation, often leading to anxiety and depression.[10]

Responses

The physical ramifications of acid attacks can be treated through long-term rehabilitation of the patient, with a range of government and non-government organizations raising money to fund further reconstructive surgery.[11] In India, certain private hospitals have opened their doors to female victims of acid attacks, free of charge.[12] Non-governmental organizations such as the Acid Survivors Foundation [ASF], which currently operates in Bangladesh, treat victims of acid attacks with extensive counseling, taking a holistic approach to rehabilitating victims of acid attacks. At the ASF, survivors receive extensive counseling, training in new skills and education, and place a particular focus upon development of social interaction through group sessions and workshops.[13]

Bangladesh has adopted specific criminal laws and procedures relating to acid attacks and has enacted laws to decrease the accessibility of acid.[14] However, other countries where attacks are common, such as India and Cambodia, have failed to do so. Coupled with the lack of medical and legal responses from countries plagued with significant numbers of acid attacks, society’s negative reactions to victims of these malicious acts is just as defeating. Encouraging a society to accept the facial disfigurement of a victim of an acid attack, and to empower these survivors rather than ostracize them, is a change that can only come through public education and a society’s willingness to break the entrenched prejudices toward them.

Stove Burning

Definition & Prevalence

Stove burning is the act of burning someone alive, either by the perpetrator’s deliberate tampering with a gasoline stove resulting in an explosion, or by dousing a person with kerosene oil and lighting them on fire. Women are the primary targets of this violent crime.[15] Many incidents of stove burning are often categorized as accidents or suicides, resulting in poor data to determine its prevalence. Even though local newspapers attempt to define these incidents as accidents, medical professionals who regularly treat burn victims report that this is an intentional misnomer. Professionals indicate that stove burnings are easy to diagnose given that a victim’s entire body has been burned, rather than just one location -- which is often an indication of an accident.[16] Most recorded instances of stove burnings take place in South-Asian countries, not coincidentally where the practice of dowry remains prevalent even though many of these countries have adopted legislation banning it.[17] Setting a woman on fire specifically because her family refuses to pay an additional dowry is a particular practice of stove burning known as ‘dowry death’ or ‘bride burning’ and is prevalent specifically in India and Pakistan. 

Causes and Contributing Factors

Stove burnings often occur as a result of domestic disputes. Husbands and in-laws will often set a woman ablaze over dowry disputes, the failure of the woman to birth a son, or the desire of a husband to marry a second wife without wanting the financial burden of supporting the first.[18] In some instances, a woman’s own family will burn her alive in an ‘honor killing.’ In recent years, these ‘honor killings’ have taken place for a woman eloping and for a woman turning down marriage proposals.[19]

Consequences

Victims of stove burning are often killed, resulting in little evidence to identify the perpetrator. Victims who survive these vicious attacks are often silenced out of fear. Upon arriving at the hospital, these women do not know if they will survive the attack, and if they do survive, fear to speak the truth because they often have no witnesses to prove their claims given that such attacks usually take place privately with no outside witnesses.[20] Often, even when survivors do report these attacks to the police, officers and courts will side with offenders and emphasize any element of doubt in the victim’s testimony to acquit offenders.[21]

Responses

In Pakistan, a country where stove burning remains a prevalent practice, the government has introduced legislation banning it and intensifying punishments for those who break the law. Pakistan also introduced a new section into its Criminal Procedure Code providing that medical or law enforcement personnel who receive a case or report of grievous burns caused by fire, kerosene oil, or other means must notify the nearest magistrate.[22] Medical officers are also required to record the statement of the injured person.[23] Despite these efforts, tribal councils in Pakistan’s northwestern regions still order this punishment for myriad offenses, often for behavior which the councils believe bring shame on the family, often for ‘offenses’ such as helping a couple elope and rejecting marriage proposals.[24]

In India, bride burning is officially recognized as a domestic violence crime carrying a punishment of up to seven years of life in prison for convicted offenders. In recent years, local government, police, and nonprofits have set up dedicated agencies to investigate reports and counsel women. Despite these efforts, it is still estimated that 8,000 Indian women die each year from the practice.[25]

Stoning

Definition & Prevalence

Stoning, or “lapidation,” is a method of capital punishment where a group throws stones at a person until the subject dies from blunt trauma, with the whole process taking between 10 to 20 minutes. Victims are buried up to their mid-riffs with soil and then executed by their community, often including members of the victim’s family.[26] The victims are allowed to try and escape from the holes they are buried in, but due to how deeply they are in the ground, it is impossible for them to actually do so. In the case of a wife being stoned to death, the process begins with the husband throwing the first stone, with the children being encouraged to follow suit.[27]

Death by stoning is still a legal punishment in Pakistan, northern Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Somalia, Sudan, Qatar, Mauritania, and Yemen.[28] Out of these countries, stonings have occurred by product of the legal system in Pakistan and Somalia. However, as recently as 2019, Brunei ratified stoning laws which imposed the death penalty by way of stoning for rape, adultery, sodomy, robbery, and insulting the Prophet Muhammad.[29] In the other aforementioned countries where stoning is not a legal punishment, it is still practiced outside the legal system by tribal groups, and at times by judges operating outside the limitations of his country’s own laws.[30]

Causes & Contributing Factors

Stoning is used to punish those who have extramarital affairs and who engage in premarital sex, although the punishment for premarital sex is more regularly 100 lashes.[31] Although stoning is not technically a woman-specific issue given that in areas where the sentence is legal, it is levied just as often against men as it is women, adultery is a woman specific crime. In many countries where stoning is prevalent, men are legally allowed to have multiple wives and many lovers, but women are punished for extramarital affairs or premarital sex with stoning or flogging.[32] Similarly, stoning is sometimes used as a form of ‘honor killing’ conducted by families against their daughters and sisters for marrying a man their families have not chosen, or for refusing an arranged marriage.[33]

Consequences

Given the inferior status of women in many countries where stoning occurs, it is often the case that women will be stoned to death based on solely an accusation.[34] Even though stoning is illegal in many countries where the practice occurs, local tribes continue to use the practice with impunity because authorities do not enforce the laws.[35] Without protection from local law enforcement, victims are often left at the mercy of local tribal authorities to determine whether their alleged behavior warrants death by stoning. Local tribal leaders are often armed and lead communities with terror tactics. Because of this, communities tend to obey and enforce their decisions -- even when they disagree with the brutality of sentences such as stoning.[36] Given the fear of living under the authority of tribal leaders, the local nature of these verdicts, and the fact that stoning victims are brutalized until death, incidences of stoning regularly go undocumented and are not publicized, making it difficult to determine its prevalence in modern times.[37]

Responses

Because stoning is legal in many countries and tolerated in others, human rights nonprofits and activist groups have been the most vocal leaders in calling for its abolition.[38] In Sudan, local women’s advocates groups have called on the international community not to abolish stoning laws, given that they are never applied as a punishment. Rather, emphasis has been placed on the need to alter legislation that negatively impacts women, pushing for a grant of equal access to justice.[39] Still, in countries where stoning is practiced either with or without the authority of the state, women’s rights groups find creative ways to push for legislative reform of stoning laws. In Afghanistan, women’s rights organizations argue for equal rights using religious arguments as the basis. While they constantly run the risk of being convicted of blasphemy, these organizations find the most efficacious way to change laws based on religious interpretation is to counter their existence with the very basis they were founded on.[40]

Flogging

Definition & Prevalence

Flogging, whipping, caning, or lashing is the act of beating the human body with an object as an instrument of punishment. Lashing is common in developing countries as a punishment for adultery.[41] It is also administered as a punishment for having sex outside of marriage -- with one hundred lashes being the regular punishment, but often permitting for the administration of up to three times that amount. Many Islamic scholars argue that lashing as a form of punishing sexual misconduct is justified due to its history in Sharia Law, making it a legitimate consequence of unlawful sexual intercourse.[42] Flogging is also administered for the purpose of punishing those who question the government’s authority or who attempt to undermine their legitimacy. In Iran, a human rights lawyer was sentenced to 74 lashes for ‘publishing falsehoods’ when she sought justice for her clients.[43] Flogging is used as a corporal punishment in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Iran, northern Nigeria, Sudan, and Yemen.

Causes & Contributing Factors

Given the public nature of floggings, it is often used to punish those whose behavior the government wants to discourage among other citizens. Like stoning, it is used to dissuade sexual relationships outside of a traditional marriage. Unlike stoning, the purpose is to punish rather than to kill. Many countries legalize this form of corporal punishment despite signing onto international treaties prohibiting the use of torture, categorizing floggings as corrective justice rather than inhumane punishment.[44]

Consequences

Like stoning, women are not the only targets of flogging -- although they are punished with it at a significantly higher rate than men. In Sudan, women face arrest and lashes for “indecent and immoral acts” including wearing trousers and knee length skirts, inappropriate activities between men and women, smoking, dancing, and other personal behavior left to the authorities’ discretion.[45] In Iran, both men and women faced arrest and lashings for dancing, mingling, and consuming alcohol at a party.[46] While men and women are victims of floggings, it is often the case that women receive disproportionately higher lashings in comparison to the male counterpart.[47] While flogging rarely results in the death of its victims, the public shame and psychological trauma can be severe for survivors. It may also cause feelings of fear, anxiety, humiliation, and shame.[48]    

Responses

While proponents of flogging argue it maintains scriptural and historical legitimacy, some have moved away from the practice as a result of pressure from human rights organizations. In 2020, Saudi Arabia ended flogging as a form of punishment in an “extension of the human rights reforms introduced under the direction of King Salman.”[49] However, this trend is unlikely to continue with rapidity despite international condemnation of the practice because it is embraced as a valid exercise of sharia law, and in forming legislation in predominantly Muslim countries, “the majority of people want to see Sharia as a source of law, and in some countries they want it as the only source.[50]