Sobia Batool Shah is being protected in hospital after a mob of male relatives attacked her in a harrowing case that highlights Pakistan’s epidemic of gender-based violence

The household was fast asleep when the six men broke in. They sought out Sobia Batool Shah, 22, and one of them attacked her with a hatchet, chopping at her limbs in an effort to sever her legs. “He was relentless and must have hit me at least 15 times,” she says.

“I screamed in pain and pleaded with him to stop, but he was like a man possessed,” she adds. “I even told him I will not seek a divorce.”

Shah was attacked by men from her own family – including her father, Syed Mustafa Shah, her uncle and cousins – who broke into the house, in Naushahro Feroze, in Pakistan’s Sindh province, as “punishment” for refusing to withdraw her application to divorce her husband.

Speaking to the Guardian by phone from the Peoples University of Medical and Health Sciences for Women, in the city of Nawabshah, where she is being treated, Shah says she is in “immense pain” and her legs are both in plaster.

  • @AceticonEnglish
    2•1 month ago

    There are always going to be nutters, self-supporting groups of nutters and even entire countries were specific kinds of nuttiness are systematically practiced (generally under the the cover of religion, tradition and/or politics).

    That said, I reckon we’re generally improving on these things, even with some sliding back involved (like in the US in the last decade) - Europe too had arranged marriages and other forms of treating women as if they were possessions - and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if similarly horrible things happened to women who refused - until a century or two ago and some of it lasted until the XX century (for example, in my own country of Portugal the 1930 Constitution of the Fascist dictatorship - which was overthrown in 74 - said that married women needed the authorization of their husbands to travel abroad, and in most of Europe and the US women only finally had the same property rights as men in the XX century).

    In the social domain things are improving - though not yet perfect - and not just in the West. It’s in the field of general access to the resources people need to survive (i.e. wealth distribution) that things have steadilly been going backwards for the last couple of decades.