Pregnant new bride dies after being set on fire in garden
By CHRIS BROOKE
Last updated at 1:06 PM on 16th October 2010


A pregnant woman has died after being found on fire in her garden.

Neighbours said the 23-year-old woman – named locally as Asiyah Khan – arrived in the country earlier this year and had an arranged marriage.
She was rarely seen outside the house, which she shared with her husband Naveed, mother-in-law and two sisters-in-law.

Scene: Police conduct their investigation in the street behind which the woman was found
Police were investigating the incident yesterday and it was not clear whether Mrs Khan had set herself on fire or had been set alight by someone else. No one has been arrested in connection with her death.

Emergency services were called to the residential street in Bradford at 7.15pm on Thursday, but Mrs Khan was pronounced dead at the scene.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1320700/Pregnant-new-bride-dies-set-garden.html

The fact is, nobody at this point knows what happened, other than she was burnt, but how is not known. Was she happy or not, nobody in the comments knows, but they jump on the bandwagon with all sorts of assumptions.

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

This is the most ridiculous comment:


"Fact- Arranged marriages are by and large successful- more successful than 'love'marriages. The divorce rates will confirm this.

Arranged marriages are NOT forced marriages- People need to learn to differentiate between the two."

Arg-h-h-h-h-h-h-h!

a good percent of marriages in japan are by arrangement -- by choice.

N/T

I don't think you'd really believe that. Even if divorce is legally possible, a society in which there is strong pressure against divorce will still have a lot of unhappy, and therefore unsuccessful, marriages.

The reason cultures with arranged marriages have fewer divorces (if indeed they do) is almost certainly that they stigmatise divorce and a lot of people are pressured into staying in unhappy marriages which, in a more liberal culture, they could escape.

Divorce is a sufficient condition for failure of a marriage, but definately not a necessary one.

Forced is forced, arranged is arranged. Some arrangements are forced...making them forced, not arranged.

There's a whole continuum from "slight pressure" to "killed if you try to get out of it". A culture of arranged marriages puts considerably increased pressure on people to accept the marriages are arranged for them. Conversely, cultures which *don't* have arranged marriages very seldom have forced ones either.

So yes, it's entirely true that many - indeed, almost certainly most - arranged marriages are in no way forced, the two phenomena are inextricably linked, and any attempt to tackle the problem of forced marriages would almost certainly need to involve a modicum of opposition to arranged marriages too to have any chance of succeeding.

Where her family says the marriage is "arranged" and if you refuse we disown you. The prospect of an arranged marriage may seem preferable to risk of being homeless on the street. The idea that unless someone is forced there is free choice is a joke.

Like most things it is a shade of gray w/ absolute force backed by threats of violence to being disowned by ones family on the other end.

with bride burning. Assumptions in this case may turn out to be warranted. How easy or common is it to set yourself on fire?

from Sri Lanka who tried to kill herself by drinking something she found at the hardware store because of problems in her marriage. fortunately she was okay.

Hard to prove, but I can't believe that most women would choose to die in such a miserable way. Slitting their wrists wouldn't cause nearly the agony, and most women would have easy access to knives.

get suicidal. It is all horrific, whatever happened.

and blame religious fundamentalism and a misogynous culture.

proven guilty?

I am not obligation to follow that line of reasoning outside a jury room. Rumsfeld has never stood trial, but he is no less a war criminal for that.

This case walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and flaps it's feathered wings like a duck -- I will have no compunction against putting a sailor suit on it and naming it Donald .

If white fundamentalist Christians or polygamist Mormons were involved - they'd be the first to scream about how horrifically oppressive and backwards "superstition" and "Christofascism" is. But somehow, whenever non-Christian religious extremism is involved, we have to take a step back, and not make any assumptions, and realize that we don't know the details of the specific situation, and be sensitive of other cultures...

Bullshit. Fundamentalist, misogynist religion is either worthy of condemnation or it's not. You don't get to make exceptions because it's more politically correct to condemn one set of misogynist fundies over another.

I brought my trumpet.

It just gives more hits to a tabloid newspaper which both reflects and shapes the racist views of many of its readers. There are perfectly normal links for this story available instead:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5iiIJ17PArKQRgO_KExV__QkGwj2Q?docId=N0301811287198182626A
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bradford-west-yorkshire-11548859

In summary, the message, yet again, to American DUers is:

Don't link to the Daily Mail!

awful story. May she rest in peace

:shrug:

The garden is anything outside the house on your property. So it might not be a nice flower garden that Americans usually think of.

My English wife keeps reminding me we don't have a "yard" we have a garden.

I wonder.

from Charlie 'Yardbird' Parker, perhaps.

Pink Floyd took their name from 2 American musicians; the Rolling Stones from a Muddy Waters track, and so on.

British houses do have yards too, of course, but they are paved or concrete areas.

the king's forearm or some such vague standard. In 1758 and again in 1760 an instrument maker, one Mr. Bird submitted a proposal to a House of Commons committee to standardize the yard measurement. Probably not where the music group got their name, but interesting. I also like muriel_volestrangler's explaination posted above.

A yard is also an enclosed area or a group of buildings. Like Scotland Yard.

Also a yard bird is a convict or an untrained army recruit.

meet the terms of the "bride price", the groom's family will kill the bride and setting her on fire is one of the ways they do it. Could this be one of those instances? I think the police need to investigate very thoroughly on this one.

"dowry" refers to money paid by the bride's family to the groom. Dowry is supposed to act as a sort of ante-mortem inheritence for the daughters, who have no legal right in India to their family's wealth upon the death of the patriarch (though they can be written into a will, they usually are not). However, dowry rarely functions in this way; it is viewed as belonging to the groom's family. Even if the bride's family pay the agreed upon dowry, the groom and his family may later demand more money by harrassing and threatening the bride. If her family fails to deliver, she may be murdered so that the groom can marry again to collect another dowry.

Should the groom perish, the bride, who is forbidden to remarry, has virtually no guarantee that his family will continue to support her...especially if she does not produce a male heir.

What a horrible end for that young woman....

:cry: