Bride burning
The wife is typically doused with kerosene, gasoline, or other flammable liquid, and set alight, leading to death by burning.
[1][2] Kerosene is often used as the cooking fuel for small petrol stoves, some of which are dangerous, so it allows the claim that the crime was an accident.
[3] Bride burning has been recognized as an important problem in India,[4] accounting for around 2,500[failed verification] deaths per year in the country.
[citation needed] One of the more culturally-founded theories suggests that in a highly patriarchal society such as India, a woman's role is defined from before she is born, which ultimately places her as lesser than men.
[8] Because she is seen as a burden and an "extra mouth to feed",[2] her status as an economic liability promotes the idea that men, who are considered physical assets, can treat women as subservient.
[8] As status is continually gained, the demand for bridal dowry increases in order to keep moving up the social ladder.
[2] Lakhani also suggests that historically speaking, the dowry system may have been conceived as a way to distinguish Muslim from Hindu culture,[8] creating a further divide within castes.
[8] Finally, some scholars argue that the dowry practice came out of British rule and influence in India to distinguish "different forms of marriage" between castes.
The Indian author Rajesh Talwar has written a play on dowry deaths titled The Bride Who Would Not Burn.
[23] Shahnaz Bukhari has said of such attacks:[23] Either Pakistan is home to possessed stoves which burn only young housewives, and are particularly fond of genitalia, or looking at the frequency with which these incidences occur there is a grim pattern that these women are victims of deliberate murder.
[25] Occasionally, bride burning happens among resettled Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in other parts of the world, such as the United States.
Aleyamma Mathew was a registered nurse at a hospital in Carrollton, Texas, who died of burn wounds on 5 April 1992.
[26] The article faced some criticism for its portrayal of non-Western countries as backward or inappropriate: "Battered by her husband, Aleyamma Mathew remained true to her culture.
It was amended in the early 1980s to "rectify several inherent weaknesses and loopholes"[8] in order to make it a criminal offense if the husband or his relatives causes a woman to "die of burns or bodily injury or unnatural circumstances within seven years of the marriage and where there is evidence that she suffered cruelty and harassment in connection with the dowry.
[2] The seven-year clause is equally problematic, as it simply allowed husbands to wait until that period ended to burn or otherwise cause the death of their bride.
One proposal calls for the expansion of the protection for women under the international refugee law in order to provide asylum to victims of gender discrimination or gendercide.
In April 1984, European Parliament introduced a proposal that would "protect women from persecution on the basis of gender"[2] by reforming international refugee laws.
