Holy Crap

When subjected to a headline like this, my eyes tend to bug out of my head for a second or two: "For More Afghan Women, Immolation Is Escape."

Waiflike, draped in a pale blue veil, Madina, 20, sits on her hospital bed, bandages covering the terrible, raw burns on her neck and chest. Her hands tremble. She picks nervously at the soles of her feet and confesses that three months earlier she set herself on fire with kerosene.

Beside her, on the next bed, her mother-in-law, Bibi Khanum, and her brother-in-law, Abdul Muhammad, 18, confirm her account but deny her reason, which Madina would explain only outside on a terrace, away from her husband's family. "All the time they beat me," she said. "They broke my arm. But what should I do? This was my home."

Accounts like Madina's are repeated across Afghanistan, doctors and human rights workers say. They are discovering more and more young women who have set themselves on fire, desperate to escape the cruelties of family life and harsh tribal traditions that show no sign of changing despite the end of Taliban rule and the dawn of democracy.

One wonders if DVIDS would report a story like this. (OK, I lie, nobody wonders about such a foregone conclusion.) The article goes on...

Educated women in the cities who were repressed by the old Taliban government have benefited from the changes in Afghanistan, and many are now working and studying. But in villages and remote tribal areas, the new order has not improved women's longstanding low status.

Daughters are often exchanged between families, are given in marriage as compensation for crimes, or are married to men two or three times their age.

When young girls marry, they leave home to live with their husband's extended family, where the mother-in-law rules the household. Often they are seen as little more than a new source of labor.