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.

  • Danquebec@sh.itjust.works
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    3 months ago

    I don’t understand how you can do this to your own daughter.

    If anything, a father should be supporting his daughter through divorce.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      It’s an extreme version of Objectification: they quiet literally think of women as their possessions and of their feelings as inconsequencial.

      Shit like this probably happenned in the West maybe 2 or 3 centuries ago when there were still things like arranged marriages.