Afghan Girls Burn Themselves To Escape Marriage

Rezagul set herself on fire to escape her marriage to an abusive and much older husband.


"HERAT, Afghanistan – We watched a teenage girl die last Friday.

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.

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..."

http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/10/29/2112069.aspx

And the society that enslaves them...

:cry:

#1) The article mentions nothing about religion.

"But popularity has spread among Afghan women, often from poor, uneducated backgrounds, where the tradition of child or forced marriages runs strong.

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


#2) You have spiritual leader of a world religion as your avatar. GOTTA HATE RELIGION? :wtf:

It's heartbreaking that she had to almost burn herself to death to get out of that disastrous marriage. God, could there be any fate worse than that of being a woman in Afghanistan? x(

and millions of dollars, which is why we created what they are now

we should have armed the women, actually.

I have always hated patriarchy no matter what form it comes in.

Nonetheless, we need to leave afghanistan , we are only making it worse.

I suggested that we could withdraw all of our male troops from the country, and leave female soldiers and Marines to arm and train Afghan women. I said that after the way they have been treated, they would do the rest. I was told they wouldn't rise up as I had imagined; instead, they would hand over their weapons to the Taliban. I thought maybe they were right; the women would not have a sense that what was being done to them was just plain wrong, not having know another way. After reading this story, I think I may have been right the first time.

The administration is talking about making deals with the Taliban as long as they renounce terror but nothing has been said about requiring them to treat women as equals. I don't know how Obama can look at his daughters and then agree to something like this.

Female military personel should refuse to go there - why should they be expected "work with" the very people who would want to enslave them?

It's way past time to get out of there.

They need to be armed and trained in martial arts. Every time word comes out of an abused woman, they need to attack her house and forcibly remove her from it. We need safe houses for these women too. No one is going to save these women but themselves, however, they are going to need some help into organizing into a force to be reckoned with.

that's commonly repeated here. It's a gross oversimplification.

I call it prostitution and child rape.

Girl children who were attractive got sold off to the highest bidder without any say in the matter. Refusing the marriage meant ostracism by the whole community and that was death. Unattractive girl children just got passed off to whoever was looking for a new wife to take care of the old, dead wife's children.

Aristocratic girls were passed off to cement treaties, end wars, and sometimes to increase family holdings.

Marrying girl children off was common, the children to be kept in the husband's household while they grew up enough to be bred--if they were lucky.

Waiting until we're old enough to consent is recent, as is caring about our consent, at all.