Pizza Diavola

A while ago, I started putting together a version of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Beijing speech that was full of links – the idea was to show how much progress has or hasn’t been made since the U.N. conference on women in 1995 and the necessity for constant, feminist activism.  Most of those links are outdated now, because I wanted it to reflect the current, constant nature of misogynist violence. However, I was flipping through the Guardian’s 24 hours in pictures section today and came across this image of a burned woman (photo below the cut):

Herat, Afghanistan: Raza Ahmadi shows the burn scars on her face and arms. She sustained burns to 45% of her body after setting herself alight to escape pressure from her father to marry
Photograph: Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images

It immediately called to mind

It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution for human greed — and the kinds of reasons that are used to justify this practice should no longer be tolerated.

It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire, and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small.

It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war.

It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide among women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes by their own relatives.

– Senator and then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, Remarks to the U.N. 4th World Conference on Women Plenary Session, Sept. 5, 1995

The power of photography is that it says so much within a single image with nary a word. The caption reveals some more but leaves me wondering (a) what form did the “pressure from her father to marry” take? What kind of violence, what kind of abuse did he inflict upon her?; (b) what was the real situation re: the marriage – was it essentially the sale of Raza Ahmadi to someone vile? Setting yourself on fire to get out of a forced (just reading between the lines here on that) marriage requires incredible desperation born out of terrible, godawful circumstances. The photograph shows the extent of the burn damage but it also shows Raza Ahmadi as alive and (mostly?) healed. The implication is that as bad as this was, it was better than the alternative she faced.  How hellish must that have been, then?  Try imagining it.

When will we reach a world where women are not treated as chattel to sell and abuse, where they have the same range of options that men do, and where women and men are considered to have equal worth and equal freedom? The lack of equity in a sexist world is not hypothetical, it is real. And it manifests in fire and wounds.

What to do? Well, here’s one option:

Women for Women International is a nonprofit that works with women in conflict and post-conflict environments:

As each woman engages in a multi-phase process of recovery and rehabilitation, she opens a window of opportunity presented by the end of conflict to help improve the rights, freedoms and status of women in her country. As women who go through our program assume leadership positions in their villages, actively participate in the reconstruction of their communities, build civil society, start businesses, train other women and serve as role models, they become active citizens who can help to establish lasting peace and stability.

Their page on Afghanistan (linked above) contains information about the status of women in Afghanistan – it’s worth a read.