Huff Post: A 49-year old female in New York suffered burns on more than 50 percent of her body because her father poured acid on her face and body.
A 29-year-old female in Montreal suffered burns on more than 70 percent of her body. Why? Her boyfriend doused acid on her face during a fit of anger, literally melting her skin away.
You didn’t know these stories because acid attacks are pigeonholed as a “Muslim problem.” And in these cases, neither the victims, nor the assailants, were Muslims. It is suggested that 99.9 percent of such attacks occur in the Muslim culture. Check out the news about the above victim in New York. It ends with a link to an Afghan acid attack story. Talk of being suggestive.
That suggestion, however, is flat out wrong. More than 80 percent of all acid attacks are committed against women. Granted, in some cases women have also committed these crimes against other men and/or women, but majority of them were retaliatory. Therefore, men are the common denominator — not Islam.
A WHO report remarked: “Apart from Bangladesh, acid violence has been reported in Afghanistan, Cambodia, China, India, Jamaica, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa and Uganda. There have also been a few isolated cases in Europe and North America.”
“Acid violence is a worldwide phenomenon,” said the Acid Survivor Trust International, the largest European organization helping the victims of acid attacks, “that is not restricted to a particular race, religion or geographical location.” According to estimates, more than 1,500 people in 20 countries are victims of acid attacks every year.