Women Burned Pakistan

Pakistan the Progressive Women's Association says that "three-hundred Pakistani women are burned to death each year by their husband's families" and that bride-burning incidents are sometimes disguised as accidents such as an 'exploding stove'. According to the Association Doctors say that victims presenting from these accidents have injuries inconsistent with stove burns. According to an Amnesty International report in 1999, though 1,600 "bride-burning" were reported, sixty were prosecuted but only two resulted in convictions. Many such crimes are also labeled as Honour Killings.

Police Often Label Attacks as Suicides

In the last few years, more than 4,000 Pakistan women have been doused in kerosene and set alight by family members--predominantly in-laws or spouses--in the area surrounding the capital Islamabad alone. Less than 4 percent survive.Reasons for women burned in Pakistan vary, but most cases center on failure to give birth to a son, the desire to marry a second wife without having the financial means to support the first and long-running animosity with mothers-in-law. There are no reliable numbers for similar cases in the rest of the country, but human rights campaigners estimate that three women a day die as a result of "choola," or stove death--a term used by Pakistani human rights campaigners in response to a pattern of perpetrators claiming the victims attempted suicide or died as the result of an exploding stove.

The Pakistan women are predominantly between the ages of 18 and 35 and around 30 percent are pregnant at the time of their deaths."Either Pakistan is home to possessed stoves which burn only young housewives, and are particularly fond of genitalia, or looking at the frequency with which these incidences occur there is a grim pattern that these women are victims of deliberate murder," says Shahnaz Bukhari, chairwoman of the Progressive Women's Association in Islamabad. There are no centers for women burned in Pakistan; sometimes the Progressive Women's Association and other women's rights groups have campaigned for over the last decade. Instead, patients receive rudimentary care in existing hospitals from well-intentioned doctors and nurses.

Activists claim that husbands' families often bribe police to label cases as suicides. Courts here are notoriously slow moving. And while the Progressive Women's Association pursues dozens of such cases a year, many of the Pakistan women simply do not survive longs enough for the justice system to complete its cycle and the cases are dropped. Should they manage to recover, the women are scared of further retribution.There are few shelter homes and plenty of social stigma that prevents Pakistan women from looking for outside help before a permanently debilitating situation arises. Police are often reluctant to investigate "family matters."