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Afghanistan
Pavenda Sargand, “Pain of Afghan suicide women,” BBC News, 17 Dec. 2006.
Gulsoom is 17-years-old and married. Last year she tried to commit suicide - she failed.
She set fire to herself but, against the odds, survived with appalling injuries.
Her plight reflects that of a growing number of young Afghan women, campaigners say.
Driven to desperation by forced marriages and abusive husbands, more and more are seeking release through self-immolation.
Gulsoom was engaged at the age of 12. Three years later her family married her to a man aged 40 who she says was addicted to drugs.
She was then taken to Iran. Her husband beat her regularly, Gulsoom says, particularly when he had no money for heroin.
"Once after I was badly beaten by my husband, I was in bed when I heard a voice murmuring and telling me to go and set fire to myself," she says.
"I went and poured petrol on my whole body. The flames on my body lasted for minutes. After eight days I found myself conscious in bed.
"I cared about my father's dignity - that's why I tolerated everything."
'No one will marry me'
Gulsoom has had many operations since she divorced her husband and faces many more.
She's not alone - there are hundreds of other women who have tried and failed to kill themselves.
Some women do manage to end their lives, but many survive with huge burns to their faces and bodies, like Gulsoom.
In many cases they have no choice but to return to the husband and the abuse from which they sought escape.
Gulsoom looks hopelessly at her scarred hands saying her only wish now is to be made better, although she says no one will marry her again with her burnt skin.
"When I wore nice clothes my husband showed jealousness," she recalls.
Forced marriages, a culture of family violence and many other social problems are given as causes for the suicides.
Afghan women have long had to suffer violence or mysterious deaths. Even now girls are still handed over in disputes or as compensation in murder cases.
Publicising abuse
The BBC's Salmi Suhaili, who works on women-related issues, says women taking their lives is not a new phenomenon in what is traditionally a very conservative society.
Monireh's story
But the rise of a civil society and a free media is helping to publicise their acts, he says.
Figures given by Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission show that more women burned themselves to death this year in the southern province of Kandahar than anywhere else in the country.
Last year, Herat in the west - where most girls marry at around 15 - was top.
Deputy minister of women's affairs Maliha Sahak says that 197 incidents of self-immolation have been recorded since March 2006, 35 of them in Kandahar province alone. A total of 69 women lost their lives.
The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan says that Kandahar's only hospital for women, which has 40 beds, received 29 cases of suicide in the space of two months. Twenty of those women had set themselves alight.
Independent Human Rights Commission head Sima Samar regrets that, five years after the Taleban were ousted, Afghan women are still suffering violence in its various forms.
She says suicide is the final decision for women who don't have any other way to solve their problems or escape abuse.
Changing mindsets
The commission has been working with the Medica Mondiale agency to try to overcome cultural obstacles and give women more of a voice.
Campaigners say violence against women must not remain hidden or it will not stop.
Deputy women's minister Maliha Sahak points to last year's protocol involving many Afghan ministries, the Supreme Court and the human rights commission.
It was passed with President Hamid Karzai's approval and banned the marriage of a woman if she is under 18 years old.
She says another law is in the pipeline which will require agreement from both man and woman for their wedding to be legal.
The women's ministry is to mount an awareness campaign targeting men in an attempt to reduce the violence.
After decades of war, Afghanistan's civil society is still in its infancy.
Those trying to end violence against women face many years of struggle to change fundamental elements of tradition and culture, as well as so-called Afghan dignity.
”Afghanistan: Suicide an option for desperate war-widows,” Women in the Middle East, No. 45, Nov.-Dec. 2006.
UNIFEM Survey revealed: "65 per cent of the 50,000 widows in Kabul see suicide the only option to get rid of their miseries and desolation." 65 per cent of the 50,000 widows in Kabul see suicide the only option to get rid of their miseries and desolation, revealed a survey conducted by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM).
"The latest research by the underground women's rights organisation the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) reveals that as many as 25,000 Afghan women worked as prostitutes in 2001 - 5,000 of those were in Kabul alone - with stark predictions that the number will rise as women and girls resort to selling themselves to escape poverty."
Addressing a news conference, UNIFEM's Director Meryem Aslan described condition of widows, especially those living in Kabul, as terrible. She said widows living in Kabul have to look after their families in face of little opportunities of earning livelihood and high rate of inflation. Without elaborating on the topic, she said 16 of the 65 per cent women had already ended their lives.
Highlighting the social structure, the UNIFEM director said family and gender discrimination and violence against women was common in most parts of Afghanistan. She said as men were the decision-makers in family structure, they were to be blamed for the gender discrimination and violence.
She said besides violence by their male partners, women were also facing physical and mental torture by their fellow women. But such cased were not as much to be reckoned, she added. Regarding the report being prepared by the UNIFEM in collaboration with other governmental and non-governmental rights agencies, she said the survey was launched in 2004 and ended in May this year. The report revealed that majority of Afghan women is victims of mental and sexual violence.
Calling it a bitter fact, Meryem said average life span of Afghan women was 20 years less than women living in other parts of the world. She said child and mother mortality rate was still very high as 1,600 to 1,900 women among each 100,000 die during childbirth. At the same time, she appreciated the improvement in women's life emerged over the past five years in terms of their participation in public life. Participation of 27 per cent women in the parliament is encouraging for the women, she noted.
"AFGHANISTAN: Desperate women choose suicide," IRINnews.org, 29 Nov. 2006.
KANDAHAR, 29 Nov 2006 (IRIN) - Some 100 women have attempted suicide by committing self-immolation or taking poison during the last eight months in the insurgency-hit southern province of Kandahar, an Afghan human rights watchdog said on Wednesday.
“Our data show that at least 64 women have attempted suicide by setting fire to themselves and 36 others have resorted to taking poisons such as rat killers during the past eight months,” Najeeba Hashimi, head of women’s rights in the Kandahar office of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), said.
“The real figure could be much higher as many cases in remote districts go unreported,” Hashimi added.
Life for women in southern Afghanistan - heartland of the Taliban who banned girls from schools and women from work during their five-year rule – remains largely unchanged despite progress elsewhere in the country. The current insurgency has made aid and development work in the region particularly difficult.
In September, Safia Hama Jan, head of women’s affairs in Kandahar province, was assassinated by gunmen in the city.
One woman who attempted suicide in the most grisly way told IRIN what had driven her to take her own life.
“I did not know how to end the misery of torture and daily beatings I got from my cruel husband. So I poured petrol on myself and set myself ablaze,” said 18-year-old Jamila, a survivor now receiving treatment for her horrific injuries in a hospital in the capital, Kabul.
With burn marks still clearly visible on her thin neck and face, Jamila said she had divorced the man after spending only four months with him and was now living with her father.
“I did not like him even at the beginning… but there was no solution because I was married by my father,” Jamila said, while hiding her disfigured face behind what’s left of her hands.
Hospitals in Kabul have treated 36 cases of self-immolation this year compared to 18 cases in 2005, according to Medica Mondiale, a German-based NGO which supports traumatised women and girls in war and crisis zones.
Despite considerable progress following the collapse of the hardline Taliban regime in late 2001 - with women’s rights now protected under the new constitution - self-immolation, forced marriages and rape remain widespread in Afghanistan, AIHRC has said.
In 2005, AIHRC reported 101 cases of self-immolation throughout Afghanistan, but the commission claimed the number could be several times higher than reported. One of the most significant causes of the rise in female self-immolation in Afghanistan is forced marriages, with between 60 and 80 percent of marriages in the country being against the will of the woman or girl, AIHRC estimates.
Although the legal age for marriage is 18, around 57 percent of girls are married before 16, according to official statistics cited by the United Nations. Besides forced marriages, a female illiteracy rate of over 80 percent and a weak justice system mean many women cannot find protection or feel that the law supports them, rights activists say.
Others link the position of women to a broader development agenda in Afghanistan. “Violence against women cannot be tackled effectively in our country unless poverty and illiteracy are addressed properly in our communities,” Abdul Quader Noorzai, regional head of AIHRC in Kandahar, said.
Alisa Tang, “Afghan women commit suicide by fire,” Associated Press, 18 Nov. 2006.
Blood dripped down the 16-year-old girl's face after another beating by her drug addict husband. Worn down by life's pain, she ran to the kitchen, doused herself with gas from a lamp and struck a match.
Desperate to escape domestic violence, forced marriage and hardship, scores of women across Afghanistan each year are committing suicide by fire. While some gains have been made since the fall of the Taliban five years ago, life remains bleak for many Afghan women in the conservative and violence-plagued country, and suicide is a common escape.
Young Gulsum survived to tell her story. Her pretty face and delicate feet were untouched by the flames, but beneath her red turtleneck sweater, floral skirt and white shawl, her skin is puffy and scarred.
More than a month after her attempt, her gnarled hands still bleed.
"It was my decision to die. I didn't want to be like this, with my hands and body like this," she said, sitting on a hospital bed in Kabul and hiding her deformed hands beneath her shawl.
Reliable statistics on self-immolation nationwide are difficult to gauge. In Herat province, where the practice has been most reported and publicized, there were 93 cases last year and 54 so far this year. More than 70 percent of these women die.
"It's all over the country. ... The trend is upward," said Ancil Adrian-Paul of Medica Mondiale, a nonprofit that supports women and girls in crisis zones.
The group has seen girls as young as 9 and women as old as 40 set themselves on fire. But many incidents remain hidden, Adrian-Paul said.
"A lot of self-immolation and suicide cases are not reported to police for religious reasons, for reasons of honor, shame, stigma. There is this collusion of silence," Adrian-Paul said on the sidelines of a conference this week in Kabul on self-immolation.
Five years after the fall of the repressive Taliban regime, domestic violence affects "an overwhelming majority" of Afghan women and girls, according to a recent report from Womankind, an international women's rights groups.
An estimated 60 to 80 percent of Afghan marriages are forced, the report said. More than half of Afghan women are married before they turn 16 and many young girls are married to men who are several decades older, the report said. The exchange of women and girls to resolve a crime, debt or household dispute is also common.
Under the hard-line Taliban regime, women were unable to vote, receive education or be employed. In recent years, women have gained the right to cast ballots and female candidates have run for parliament, but women are often still regarded as second-class citizens.
For Gulsum, who goes by one name, the marriage proposal came with a simple cultural gesture her father could not refuse: The groom's sister-in-law lay her newborn son at the father's feet — an act signifying purity and innocence — and asked for the girl's hand.
"My father said, 'The baby is like a holy book, so I can't say no,'" the teenager recalled of her abrupt betrothal last year to a white-haired, 40-year-old man. "In the tradition of our country, when our fathers give us away to be married, we have no choice but to accept."
She and her husband lived for six months at her parents' home in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif. The newlyweds then moved in with his family in neighboring Iran, which is home to many Afghan refugees.
Once out of her parents' care, her husband turned to heroin and alcohol, and the beatings began, Gulsum said. The beatings became worse when she confronted her husband about his addictions. The last time he hit her was earlier this fall when she set herself on fire.
Her husband and his family did not help the burning girl. Their neighbor wrapped her in a blanket to put out the fire and took her to the hospital.
Herat public health director Raoufa Niazi has seen about 150 self-immolation cases over the past two years and pleads with women who survive that fire is not the way to escape their problems. "I tell them to go to complain to the government, but the government doesn't help them," Niazi said. "The government doesn't punish the people who hurt these women. Instead, they just say, 'Why has she done this to herself?'"
Gulsum has since been transferred to a hospital in Kabul, where she has undergone surgery to release the contracted muscles of her neck, and must undergo three or four more procedures to repair other muscles.
She is happier lately and wants to wear pretty clothes again, but has no plans for her future yet. "Let me get better first. When I'm better, then I'll decide what to do," she said. "For now, who would want to marry me?"
Bronwen Roberts, “Forced marriage, abuse behind self-immolation by Afghan women,” Yahoo! News, 14 Nov. 2006.
Forced marriage and chronic abuse are among the key triggers for the growing cases of self-immolation among women in Afghanistan, a regional conference heard.
The high rate of illiteracy -- with under 20 percent of women said to be literate -- and an incompetent justice system also meant many women cannot see their way out of problems and so take their lives, the three-day meeting heard.
The conference of about 200 people, including from other countries that have similar rates of suicide like Bangladesh, Iran, India and Sri Lanka, was called to try to find ways to stop the phenomenon.
Experts said there were no accurate overall figures, with hospitals and police not keeping proper records and many families hiding their cases because of shame with suicide against Islam.
However non-government organisation medica mondiale presented research that showed that Kabul hospitals recorded 18 cases of self-immolation in 2005 and 36 this year.
In the western city of Herat the trend was rising with cases reported on a daily basis and 60 percent of the women involved illiterate, it said.
The reasons women and girls resorted to such drastic action included forced marriage, being given to another family to settle a dispute and conflict with in-laws, with some fathers-in-law demanding sex, it said.
"It is the final decision for women who don't have any other way to solve their problems," Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) chief Sima Simar told the meeting.
A 16-year-old survivor named Gulsum told delegates she had set herself alight after being beaten by her drug-addicted husband, a man 25 years older than her whom her father had made her marry.
"When he did not have access to heroin and narcotics, he tortured me. After midnight he would hit me."
"That night he hit me and hit my head. Blood was coming from my nose. I asked him why he was doing it and he hit me even more."
In an addled state, she pour benzine on herself and lit a flame.
Now undergoing a series of operations, Gulsum has divorced the man, a rare step in patriarchal and conservative Afghanistan where divorce is taboo and custody of children mostly goes to the husband.
Between 60 and 80 percent of marriages in Afghanistan are forced, according to the AIHRC. And although the legal age for marriage is 18, around 57 percent of girls are married before 16, according to official statistics cited by the United Nations.
A message delivered to the meeting from President Hamid Karzai said self-immolation arose from psychological problems among women in post-conflict countries.
Deputy health minister Faizullah Kakar said biological issues such as allergens and nutritional deficiencies could also play a role in depression that may lead them to commit suicide.
But Suraya Sobhrang, also from the AIHRC, said the real causes were more to do with the poor way women were treated through cultural practises and because of inadequate state protection and impunity for perpetrators.
Women in the post-Taliban society were also becoming aware of their rights but could not find the support, through courts or legislation, to match their expectations, she said on the sidelines of the meeting.
Sobhrang estimated there was violence in about 90 percent of Afghan families which could partly be blamed on the nearly three decades of war the country had gone through.
"It is clear continuing war in Afghanistan was very much damaging to the social values but it is also clear that it isn't all to blame," she said, listing poverty, tradition and illiteracy as other factors.
Fiji
"Violence Against Women in the Pacific," Fiji Women's Crisis Centre, 24 Aug. 2005.
Violence against women has profound mental, physical and reproductive health effects. Women subjected to violence suffer from low self-confidence, low self-esteem and have increased risk of depression, anxiety and suicide. These mental health factors also contribute to poor physical health generally, in addition to a range of physical injuries with both short-term and long-term chronic effects. In Fiji and other countries in the Pacific, some women see suicide as a means of escaping the violence in their lives. The Samoa Family Health and Safety Research found that 19% of women in who had been abused in the previous 12 months had thought of suicide and 8.4% had attempted to commit suicide.
India
Parmindar Singh,”Woman commits suicide, husband arrested. Fifth suicide case in one week,” Chandigarh Tribune, 26 April 2005.
The police have arrested a man for torturing his wife who committed suicide in Naya Bans area here. Domestic discord was the cause of the suicide, the police said.
... this is the fifth case of suicide during the past one week in Noida.
The father of the deceased has filed a dowry death case against his son-in-law who has since been arrested.
Bhuwan Singh of Chamoli had been married to 20-year-old daughter of Devinder Kumar a year ago. He was working in a factory in Sector-4 Noida and lived in Naya Bans. When Bhuwan Singh came home after duty in the evening, he found the room bolted from inside. Suspecting something untoward, he informed the police.
When the Sector-20 police opened the door, his wife Maya was found hanging from the fan.
The body was sent for autopsy. Maya’s father rushed to Noida on hearing the incident. In a written report, he has accused Bhuwan of having abetted his wife to suicide, since she had not been able to meet the dowry demands.
Pakistan
“Five ‘victims of domestic torture’ commit suicide,” Dawn, Karachi, 15 Aug. 2006.
SUKKUR, July 31: … five women have killed themselves in Pano Akil over the past five days reportedly because of torture they suffered at the hands of their husbands.
According to Taluka Hospital Pano Akil sources, seven persons were brought to the hospital during last five days out of whom six including the five women lost their lives, while a man was saved.
Sources said that Sughra Kalwar of Kalwar village, Bashiran Bullo and Salma Shah of Chanesar Bullo village committed suicide due to torture by their husbands, while Longni Shaikh of Bindki village, Peerani of Thekrato and Mangio of Bakar committed suicide over some domestic problems.
Links
The Global Persecution of Women
Glossary
