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.
![[CW: Violence] She wanted a divorce so her father hacked her legs with an axe: how Pakistan fails women](https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/05ffda99-def1-46d6-b65e-e501ce2f45bd.webp?format=webp&thumbnail=196)
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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.
I wish there were a way to eradicate religious fundamentalism from this world.
Mandatory
laicsecular free public education. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Ferry_lawsBut how do you get people in fundamentalist-run countries to agree to that?
You pray your private god that there will be a Taliban Gorbachev in a few decades?
Yet you'll hear none of them condemn this action. There will be no new stories or articles. Nobody will protest. Which indicates tacit acceptance.
There are people protesting in the image from the article..
Notice it's only women?
There are seven or eight men clearly visible in the photo.
Are you protesting? Otherwise, I'm not sure you should be pointing fingers.
I protest the malfeasance committed in my own country whether it be travesties of justice, bad policy, or corruption. In the above case, protests against the subjugation and violence against that woman in the name of religion should come primarily from Pakistani muslim men. The world takes a keen interest in such brazen acts with common news reports on acid attacks and maimings. You know who you never hear from on the subject though?: Muslim men.
Sorry... you're saying Muslims should protest religious fundamentalism in a country full of religious fundamentalists?
Because I'm guessing they don't have any more of a death wish than you do.
So you've actively searched the web for every Muslim man who's on social media to see if they've stood up against these brutalities?
Cool. Please post a list so we can verify it.
This is the same "but do you condemn Hamas?" nonsense. If you're a Muslim, you don't need to condemn things like this any more than anyone else does. That this is wrong is the default position. I have seen absolutely nothing to suggest that this is something most Muslim parents would do to their children or approve of anyone else doing it to their children.
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.
If this is what did it for you, you're going to hate the entirety of human history.
One would hope humans would get less barbaric over time.
We objectively have
And yet nowhere near enough.
I don't think we as a species have it in us to not be pieces of shit. Individuals absolutely do, but I'm not very conviced we'll manage to unfuck our plains ape selves before things go really sideways due to climate change and resource scarcity, and we revert back to a more "natural" state
no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
(yes that's Hobbes. No I'm not sorry.)
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.