Scant Hopes for Pakistan’s Abused Wives

Wrapped in a blood-caked shawl, her nose covered by a dirty gauze bandage, Nusrat Parveen trembled as she recalled the horrific morning when her husband cut off her nose.

Enraged because she had complained about his bad temper to his mother, he slammed her against their bed. He threw her on her back, tied her legs to the bed and her hands behind her back.

For a brief moment he disappeared, but when he returned he was carrying scissors, a knife and a sharpening tool.

“I saw these things in his hands and I started shrieking,” she recalled, her eyes riveted on her hospital bed, her hands clutching the sheets.

Then he sat on the floor beside her and began sharpening the knife and the scissors. Slowly he got up.

“I didn’t know what he would do. I screamed and screamed,” she said.

With the scissors he cut her hair. Then he climbed onto her chest and with a single swipe of the knife he sliced off her nose.

Ancient tradition in Pakistan says that to cut off a woman’s nose is the greatest humiliation, a sign for everyone that she is scorned by her husband, an outcast.

“I fainted,” Parveen said.

Nothing happened to her husband. She went to the police, but her husband said she was an evil woman and police refused to file charges.

In Pakistan’s male-dominated society, often ruled by conservative traditions, domestic violence is tolerated.

Shahnawaz Bokhari, the one-woman Progressive Women’s Assn. that is trying to help women who are abused by their husbands and in-laws, said it is not easy to introduce reforms.

Bokhari is campaigning to get the government to introduce laws to protect women. She knocks on the doors of government ministries, foreign aid organizations and embassies begging for financial help for the victims and a sympathetic ear from the government.

For Parveen, the hospital bill alone will be thousands of dollars, a sum she cannot afford. Cosmetic surgery to rebuild her nose will be much more, said Bokhari, sitting beside Parveen’s hospital bed.

Bokhari wants the government to enact laws to protect women, providing a support system for them through shelters and legal and financial aid. And she wants offending husbands punished, something that rarely happens.

“We do not want the government to help just one Nusrat Parveen. . . . We want them to do something collectively, provide a support system for women,” she said.

Hundreds of Pakistani women die each year after being set on fire, Bokhari said. Such deaths are invariably described as accidents, like a grease fire in the kitchen.

But the deaths are intentional, murders carried out by relatives, Bokhari said.

The government agrees.

Ashtar Ausaf Ali, a prime ministerial advisor on human rights, said he has begun investigating these so-called “stove deaths.”

“I’ve reached the conclusion that in most cases the girl or woman is killed with the active support of her husband and often her mother-in-law,” Ali said.

Statistics are hard to come by.

But Bokhari said in Gujar Khan, the rural Punjab town where Parveen lives, 57 women have died so far this year--all of them from extensive burns.

Ali said he wants to see stricter laws and greater investigative powers given to the police.

Farkhanda Iqbal, a female deputy superintendent of police, said police officers also have to improve investigative techniques. “The police never bother to recover the stove, which always cleverly disappears after the blast,” she said.

Pakistan’s human rights commission said no one has ever been convicted in a stove burning.

In the hospital bed next to Parveen lay Tasneen Bibi, 25. The left side of her face was bright red and contorted, her eye was partially closed and, below it, a wound festered.

She said her in-laws threw acid on her face while she slept.

“I just screamed and screamed. It hurt and hurt. I couldn’t do anything,” she said.

She has had several operations, one to pry her head from her shoulders where it had joined.

“I don’t know what I did. My husband was always yelling at me,” she said.

Neither woman really knows what she wants to do after leaving the hospital. But Bibi said she probably will return to her husband because she has nowhere else to go. He has their two small children and, although she is afraid to return, she doesn’t want to lose them.

“I will go home. . . . What choice do I have?” she said.

Parveen won’t go back. She said she only wanted her 3-year-old daughter and nothing more to do with her husband.

“I am not related to anyone anymore. I just want my baby,” she said.