She wanted a divorce so her father hacked her legs with an axe: how Pakistan fails women
She wanted a divorce so her father hacked her legs with an axe: how Pakistan fails women
Sobia Batool Shah is being protected in hospital after a mob of male relatives attacked her in a harrowing case that highlights Pakistan’s epidemic of gender-based violence
The household was fast asleep when the six men broke in. They sought out Sobia Batool Shah, 22, and one of them attacked her with a hatchet, chopping at her limbs in an effort to sever her legs. “He was relentless and must have hit me at least 15 times,” she says.
“I screamed in pain and pleaded with him to stop, but he was like a man possessed,” she adds. “I even told him I will not seek a divorce.”
Shah was attacked by men from her own family – including her father, Syed Mustafa Shah, her uncle and cousins – who broke into the house, in Naushahro Feroze, in Pakistan’s Sindh province, as “punishment” for refusing to withdraw her application to divorce her husband.
Speaking to the Guardian by phone from the Peoples University of Medical and Health Sciences for Women, in the city of Nawabshah, where she is being treated, Shah says she is in “immense pain” and her legs are both in plaster.
Nothing destroys a family's honour more than harming their children.
I don't understand how you can do this to your own daughter.
If anything, a father should be supporting his daughter through divorce.
It's an extreme version of Objectification: they quiet literally think of women as their possessions and of their feelings as inconsequencial.
Shit like this probably happenned in the West maybe 2 or 3 centuries ago when there were still things like arranged marriages.
livestock
This isn't simply "fundamentalism". It's culture. There are religions, less popular ones, in which the fundamentalists aren't mega assholes. Fundamentalist Jains, for example, are unlikely to do this kind of shit.
The problem here is the World religions combined, somewhat inevitably, with honor culture. Full article: Explaining the rise of moralizing religions: a test of competing hypotheses using the Seshat Databank
You're right. It essentially boils down to the culture of men ... the misogyny that shelters men and places the onus on women to create a world that men can live in comfortably, without temptation, without loss of face.
It's fucking exhausting.
Most men are cowards it seems
Well... there goes the last shred of hope I had for sanity in this world...
When religious fanaticism combines with ignorance this is how the men are. They carry iPhones but their morals and ethics haven't changed in centuries. Pakistan remains a backward shithole.
I wish there were a way to eradicate religious fundamentalism from this world. I have issues with religion in general, but the big problem has always been fundamentalists, unwilling to change and progress and keep up with modern morality.
And to be clear, this is not a condemnation of Islam as a whole. There are lots of more moderate Muslims in the world who, I am sure, are just as horrified by this as I am.
This is a daily thing in the world in many countries. It's freaking awful. Honor crime must stop. We need to have education in these countries in school where honor is taught as something else than what it means today.
There are always going to be nutters, self-supporting groups of nutters and even entire countries were specific kinds of nuttiness are systematically practiced (generally under the the cover of religion, tradition and/or politics).
That said, I reckon we're generally improving on these things, even with some sliding back involved (like in the US in the last decade) - Europe too had arranged marriages and other forms of treating women as if they were possessions - and I wouldn't be at all surprised if similarly horrible things happened to women who refused - until a century or two ago and some of it lasted until the XX century (for example, in my own country of Portugal the 1930 Constitution of the Fascist dictatorship - which was overthrown in 74 - said that married women needed the authorization of their husbands to travel abroad, and in most of Europe and the US women only finally had the same property rights as men in the XX century).
In the social domain things are improving - though not yet perfect - and not just in the West. It's in the field of general access to the resources people need to survive (i.e. wealth distribution) that things have steadilly been going backwards for the last couple of decades.
Another point for the religion of peace! If you're part of any organized religion, congratulations - you're one of the people who enables this batshit behaviour.
Plenty of religious people are non-violent and plenty of non-religious people are. It is indeed one of the easiest routes to radicalise someone to do awful things but also not the only one.
I'm not disagreeing, it's just that when there's one thing common among a huge percentage of violent people, maybe you should look into it.
And religion and especially islam is there way too often. If it was up to me, I'd ban all organized religion, starting with islam and christianity following shortly after.
This has zilch to do with Islam which allows divorce.
I don't understand why we give Islam a pass, a lot of the religion is based on the same barbaric Christian beliefs that we're all too happy to very rightly call out and shit on. I'd even say the Qur'an is worse than the Christian bible in many ways, given the war heavy times it was written in.
We obviously need to be careful of equating Muslim with brown, and I get that a lot of people are just racist and don't have a more in-depth understanding of the actual religion. But the religion of Islam itself doesn't just deserve a free pass because of that
This is beyond horrific. I think I'm going to unsubscribe from this community. I can't keep reading stuff like this daily.
This makes me want to puke, what a fucking world we live in
Shit like this makes me want to drop my anti-Islamophobia and replace it with a more logical position of being against anti-arab racism.
Because Islam, like Christianity, tends to lead people to do horrific things to please their imaginary sky daddy. I'm seeing fewer and fewer reasons not to be deeply critical of it, if not outright opposed to parts of it.
Pakistanis are not Arabs...
Must have been a dull hatchet LOL ol poor ass mafucka can't even afford a decent axe. Dowry must have been fat
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