The AFP is reporting on an alarming trend in Afghanistan and Iran where young teen girls are so desperate to get out of their forced marriages that they're choosing self-immolation rather than continue to suffer.
Doctors at burn units in the city hospital of Herat in Afghanistan say they've seen 83 cases of self-immolation in the past year alone, with nearly two-thirds of the cases proving fatal.
“Sometimes it’s for very small reason they burn themselves, and most of them complain about the in-law’s family,” said chief of plastic and reconstructive surgery at the burns unit, Ghafar Khan Bawa.
“There’s an accumulation of depression, stress and domestic violation and then the woman just seeks a way of getting out of the situation. A way of expressing their anger, a way of expressing their depression.”
At the heart of the problem is feuding that often occurs between poor and uneducated families who marry off their young daughters into problematic relationships. Police, tribal elders, Mullahs and courts all exist to resolve family disputes, which are common within Afghanistan’s illiterate communities, but it's considered culturally taboo for a woman to complain.
“There’s a defect in the system because a woman cannot complain here. And if they were not accepted before burning themselves, then how will they be accepted with disfigurement and deformities and disabilities?” added Bawa.
In one of the cases cited in the AFP article, a 16 year-old girl named Aatifa who was married at age 14 said her mother-in-law criticized her housework and encouraged her mechanic husband to beat her for allowing her mother to visit too often. When she complained to authorities, she was berated for causing trouble. Later, her husband professed his hatred for her and announced plans to marry a second woman. Aatifa swung between rage and depression before reaching her breaking point. One day, she poured gasoline over her head, stepped outside the house and lit a match.
Thankfully, her brother saw her and smothered the fire, but not before two thirds of her body was engulfed in flames.
While being interviewed by the AFP in the hospital, her shrieks of "Allah" could be heard throughout the halls as doctors prepared her for skin grafting.
“I just wanted to kill myself, this was my goal,” she said. "What can I do? I’m not useful anymore. I want to get a divorce, it’s better to stop everything.”
Another girl, 18-year-old Zarkhuna, used a black burqa and red blanket to conceal the burns that cover 65 percent of her body. She said that before her marriage, her husband-to-be's family seemed nice, but once they moved in with the newlyweds, fighting erupted.
“My husband wasn’t cruel to me," she told the AFP. "But my mother and sister-in-law were complaining all the time about my job — they became jealous.”
Since setting herself on fire four months ago, she has been banned from seeing her 10-month-old baby, but is still hoping that the incident will bring about peace in her family.
“The mother and sister wanted me to be under their control not under my husband’s. If he behaves nicely with me I will continue with him.”
Suraya Pakzad, a women's rights advocate in Herati, said many of these girls are just too young to cope with the wifely roles expected of them, plus having to deal with family feuds, all of which amounts to dangerous levels of stress.
“Maybe not all of them decide to die, it’s just a warning for their family to stop, and they never thought fire would immediately go to all of their body,” Pakzad said.
Her organization, Voice of Women’s Organization, operates two shelters for women, but all cases must be referred through the government.
Once the girls realize there are other options besides killing themselves to escape their unbearable living situations, all of the teens said they wished things had worked out differently.
“Whenever we meet them and talk to them they say they really regret what they did.”
Sadly, for too many girls in these backward societies, this information is coming much too late.
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