Straight Talk
Suma's story
IMAGINE for a moment what it is like to live your life in fear. You are 12 years old, studying in class seven, enjoying spending time with your school friends, watching your favourite soap operas and reality shows instead of doing homework, listening to new artists on the radio, slipping out of the house to spend time giggling and gossiping with your friends, pleading with your parents to buy you a mobile phone, your whole life ahead of you.
Then a shadow falls on your life. You notice a man, old enough to be your father, following you, his eyes moving up and down your body, making you feel uncomfortable. Everywhere you go, there he is, his steady, unblinking stare, his ravaged face, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his sneering lips, his teeth stained yellow, his eyes bloodshot.
One day he approaches your parents and demands your hand in marriage, never mind that he is middle-aged and repellent, that he is already married with two children, that you are too young to even begin noticing the boys in your class at school, that he makes your skin crawl and your heart thump with fear when you see him, that you lie awake at night, terrified, your stomach turning over, unable to sleep, your eyes and ears straining in the darkness for any unfamiliar sight or sound.
He is well-known in the locality as a man not to cross. His eyes are filled with malevolence as he swaggers into your home and contemptuously demands you for himself, not pausing to wipe his feet outside the door, tracking mud into your spotless home, not even putting out his cigarette as a mark of respect to your parents, sprawling himself across your front-room, aggression, arrogance and menace oozing from his paunchy but still powerful frame, the threat of violence behind his every movement.
Your parents are simple people. Your father trades vegetables at Gabtoli market in Dhaka. They do not want trouble with this man. They know what he is capable of. They try to put him off. They plead with him that you are too young, that they will think about it when you are older. Evenings you sometimes catch them speaking to one another in hushed voices, tension and fear etched on their loving faces. You wake one night to get a glass of water and see your mother sitting in the balcony, her head bowed, weeping silently as her fingers move across her prayer beads.
The man's harassment of you continues. Now he does not merely follow you and stare at you from afar but comes right up to you, so close that you can smell the foulness of his breath, see the savage glint in his eyes as he leers at you, making vile and obscene remarks in a low, guttural tone, reaching out to grab at you with his nicotine-stained fingers.
He grows more aggressive and threatening daily. You return home from school every day in tears until you can take it no longer and beg your parents to keep you at home so that you don't have to run the gauntlet of his harassment and humiliation twice a day. You barricade yourself in your house only to see him from the balcony, lounging outside your gate with his two friends, making catcalls, and staring up at you with malice and spite.
One day he barges back into your house, and when your parents again plead with him for time, he grows furious, smashing a flower vase against the wall. He grabs your father by the throat and demands one lakh in "compensation" for being "kept waiting" for two years. He storms out of the house, slamming the door behind him, threatening terrible consequences if he is not satisfied.
Three days later he returns with his two friends and a pot of acid and flings it at your face and upper body, and your life, as you know it, is over. You are 14 years old.
I couldn't come up with a more horrific story if I tried.
If there is a more grotesque crime than this, I can't think of it. The only silver lining to Suma's tragic story is that the man who did this to her was apprehended on Wednesday and we can now hope and pray that he gets the death penalty in accordance with the law. Frankly, capital punishment is too good for him, but one takes what one can get.
The Acid Survivors Foundation, Prothom Alo, the late Nasreen Huq, among others, deserve unending praise for the tireless work on behalf of the victims of acid attacks like Suma. In large part due to their combined efforts, the numbers of acid attacks have been coming down and convictions are on the rise.
Last year there were 156 recorded acid attacks in Bangladesh, down from a high of 367 in 2002, though there are also cases that remain unreported so the full number is undoubtedly higher, leading to 48 convictions for an approximately 30% conviction rate.
We have done a creditable job in terms of rehabilitating acid victims and helping them lead a full and productive life. Public awareness campaigns as to the appalling nature of the crime have helped to decrease its prevalence. But where we need to do more is on the prosecutorial side.
As long as two out of every three acid attackers walk free, as long as the men who perpetrate such crimes consider themselves untouchable by the law, these kinds of attacks will continue to occur. No one flings acid on the spur of the moment or in the heat of passion. These are cold-blooded, calculated, pre-meditated crimes. Severe and certain consequences can therefore effectively reduce their incidence.
Look at the present case. Suma's attacker did nothing to hide his identity or his intentions. The brazenness of the attack is part of what made it so reprehensible. Nor is his crime solely his cruel disfigurement of a young girl. What made him feel that he could ruin her life with impunity is the same thing that made him believe that he could terrorise her for the two years prior with impunity.
This is the kind of criminality under the shadow of which too many Bangladeshis must live their lives. It is a crying shame. People should not have to live their lives in fear.
If there is one thing Bangladeshis want and have a right to expect from their government, it is to be kept safe and sound.
Sociologist Naomi Hossain in a piece entitled "The Price We Pay" published in the January 2008 edition of Forum magazine, pointed out the debilitating cost to individuals and society that was wrought by the fact that so many of our citizens have little recourse to law and must live insecure, vulnerable, and defenceless lives:
"This, it seems, is how you live in rural Bangladesh. You sleep (in squalor) next to your cow so it is not stolen overnight. You marry your daughter off before she sprouts breasts so as to avert her rape. You never really get ahead of the game because you have cut off your nose to spite your face."
Let us never underestimate the crushing effect that lawlessness and a culture of impunity has on the common men, women, and children of Bangladesh. Nothing scars their lives so severely as their lack of security in their persons and property, and a safer and more secure Bangladesh in which everyone has recourse to justice and can live free from fear is both a moral imperative and absolutely within our capabilities.
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