ACID ATTACK - A SCAR ON WORLD

India has the highest number of acid attacks in the world, but the worst conviction rates. As is often the case with other crimes against women, acid attacks are treated with official apathy and societal indifference. The victims are usually women between the ages of 14 and 35 years, and the attack often occurs as revenge for rejecting a marriage proposal or sexual advances, showing the peculiar mindset of male entitlement and power, and no right for a woman to refuse. Women have had acid thrown at them for not bringing enough dowry, for bearing a female child and for not cooking a good enough meal.

Acid attacks on women have become the most burning area and are considered to be the nastiest and the most atrocious kind of violence committed on weaker sex.

Acid attack survivors undergo immense daily trauma – they are blinded, scarred beyond recognition, robbed of their identity, often unable to step out of the house, seek employment or lead a normal life ever again.

Perpetrators usually intend to disfigure rather than kill their victims. The patriarchal reasoning that a woman’s appearance. Acid attacks are often specifically used to ruin a woman’s future romantic prospects, her career, financial security and social status. This perverse logic for acid attacks appears to hold water everywhere in the world.

Perpetrators of acid violence are almost always men, and toxic masculinity —the desire to permanently victimize someone while demonstrating his own power and brutality —is almost always the underlying cause regardless of whether the victim is a woman, man or transgendered person.

None of the policies and interventions aimed at responding to acid violence have engaged meaningfully with this fact. Proactive prevention strategies must involve sensitizing men and boys to the effects of gender-based violence, including acid attacks, and incorporating them into prevention activities.

Such approaches should be prioritized – or at least simultaneously implemented – as reactive strategies such as policing acid sellers and purchasers and seeking longer jail sentences for perpetrators.