After Acid Attack, Elders Put Value On A Face Spurned Suitors In Bangladesh Lash Out By Disfiguring Women

Peyara, victim of acid attack By Barry Bearak New York Times GOSARIGAON, Bangladesh - The village elders met under a litchi tree, applying their collective wisdom to put a value on Peyara’s grotesquely ruined face.

The crime was hideous, they soberly agreed. A young man had become obsessed with her, but she was married and he was turned away. He took his revenge with sulfuric acid, to erase the beauty that had once enchanted him and to empty her life of happiness.

But what is done cannot be undone, the elders said. The attacker had been arrested. And his uncle had long pressed them to hold a shaleesh - or informal court - to mediate between the parties. He was willing to pay the victim’s family a reasonable sum to atone for the wrong and buy his nephew’s freedom.

So when the seven elders met, they tried hard to be fair. Some who had seen the horrible disfigurement thought $10,000 a proper settlement. But others wondered aloud: His had been a crime of wild passion. Do a man’s emotions go so wild unless a woman has done something improper? To them, $1,000 seemed enough.

They finally agreed on reparations: $3,000.

In Bangladesh, such stories have become plentiful. In the 12 months through March 1999, 174 acid attacks were reported. Most often, the culprit is a spurned suitor.

No one is sure why this crime occurs here at such a high pace, for this nation on the Indian subcontinent is not so different from many others in its poverty or its culture or its treatment of women. Inexplicably, some aberrant ripple is moving through the countryside. Nariphokko, a woman’s rights group, has kept statistics: 80 attacks in 1996, 117 in 1997, 130 in 1998.

The purpose of the attacker is to manufacture a living hell, and in that there is most often fulfillment.

Survivors are left not only with their inflicted deformity but also with the peculiarities of village and family reckoning. One young woman was forced by her parents to marry her attacker, solving the urgent matter of who would support a woman unwanted as a bride. Another was forbidden to come home until she allowed her husband to take a second wife.

“The man who did this to me is in jail,” said Peyara, her eyes behind the dark glasses that conceal her worst scars. “But I am in jail, too, and for me there is no door, no escape, nothing.”