The British medical journal has found that more than 100,000 young women were killed in fires in India in a single year — a rate three times men. Notably, the women fell within a 15-34-year age group, the very group often involved in marital disputes.
Women are often doused with gasoline and set ablaze due to disputes over dowries or other grievances. Their deaths are then claimed as kitchen accidents. The U.S. researchers found 163,000 fire-related deaths in 2001, or 2 percent of all deaths in India. Of that number, 106,000, or 65 percent, were women.
Honor killings and caste related killings remain very common in the country.
In neighboring Pakistan, women are also being burned with acid and killed husbands or boyfriends.
Ultimately, it remains the governments who bear much criticism in the failure to prosecute such crimes in greater numbers to create some level of deterrence.
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Ditto what MikeS and Buddha wrote, my wife keeps me from doing stupid things all the time. I think it is emotional intelligence and she has it in copius amounts.
Without women, we would not have civilization. I don’t mean for the babies either. Through out human history, women – by their very nature – have driven civilization. Women are indeed different than men. They are often intelligent in ways men are not (and in fairness, vice versa), but it’s this “social” intelligence that makes them so critical. I chose the word “social” over the word “emotional” for two reasons. 1) Emotional has a value load that could be perceived as sexist and 2) it’s not really the most accurate term. Women, being the physically weaker, have a survival trait that compensates – socialization. Call it “emotional intelligence” if you must. What they cannot achieve alone, they will do in a group, be that gathering food or rallying a community around an issue. They are naturally more cooperative than men. And let’s face it. Left to our own devices, men would have destroyed the world by now. Our survival traits that served us so well on the savannah (aggression, strength and spatial orientation) ultimately have limited utility to society/civilization and are inherently destructive. I’ve said it before, the next step in human evolution has to be a conscious decision to operate cooperatively for the common good and drop the competitive model of behavior that has served us well to this point, but is now in danger of killing our species.
We should be learning from women, not burning them.
Add Hinduism, to Christianity (fundamentalist), Islam, Judaism and who knows what else, in promoting misogyny. Men of all backgrounds need to learn that women are at least our equals in all respects. They are not eye candy, chattel, or our property in any sense. They are every bit the equal (if not greater) of men in intelligence and most everything else. Part of historic humanity’s general misery has always been the need for men to prove themselves men, whether by the length of their equipment, or violence. Unless we learn to get beyond it the world will remain in an existence of quiet desperation. I do have much pessimism though that this epiphany by males will ever happen.