Suicide in Afghanistan (guess who, the first two guesses don't count)

[ensho]

http://blogs.aljazeera.net/asia/2009/11/28/suicide-afghanistan


The last time I stood by the bedside of a woman who’d tried to burn herself to death was in Kandahar one year ago. She was screaming in pain and later died. It was not an experience I wanted to repeat.

But this week I found myself in the Burns Unit at a hospital in Herat watching a mother spoon feed her child some rice through lips that were horribly blistered. Yet another case of self-immolation and another image that will haunt me long after I’ve left Afghanistan.

Letifa was only 11 years old when her father told her she had been betrothed to a man who was more than twenty years her senior. One day she simply poured petrol over her head and struck a match.

The doctors say she has a fifty-fifty chance of surviving. The burns went deep.
There’ve been 66 such cases admitted to this specialized clinic so far this year. 41 of them have died.

There are many other cases where the victims live in outlying villages and never reach the hospital. The official statistics probably give no real indication of the scale of this problem in Afghanistan.

There is a social stigma attached to suicide here. Many families send their daughters to Iran for treatment. But all social workers in this field agree the reasons behind the suicide attempts are chillingly similar.

Forced marriages and violent abuse drive the women to despair. Few of them even know about their rights to divorce.
-snip-
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and they die left and right during childbirth.

our military should be arresting and jailing abusive husbands and fathers that sell underage daughters into marriage. I'd be ok with that war.

[msongs]

1. our military should be getting out there asap nt

[Robb]

2. Yes, that worked so well in 1989. nt

[StarfarerBill]

3. The bigheads at the Pentagon *want* conservative, misogynistic values in Afghanistan...

...as long as they control those who practice those values. Letting Afghan women get uppity and demand to be considered something beyond slaves isn't in the war-honchos' interests, you know...