Essay On Bride Burning

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Miriam Al Khatib Bride Burning It’s been said that being burned alive is the most painful thing a person can go through, every 90 minutes a woman in India encounters this pain. Bride burning is when a wife is set on fire due to an unsatisfactory dowry. The attacker, usually the in-laws or the husband himself, does this in order to get re-married and demand a dowry from his new wife.This is a growing issue in India and other South Asian countries (such as Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka). This isn’t something that everyone knows about, but it’s very important since the increasing numbers of bride burning is affecting India because it promotes injustice towards women. For the past few decades bride burning has been a major problem in India, it is also effecting the social life of the country. In 1961 the Dowry Prohibition Act officially stated that demanding a dowry was illegal. Punishments can vary from lifetime imprisonment to death. In the early 1990’s the reports of burning wives had increased dramatically. It started in the mid 1980’s, where there were around 400 reports on bride burning yearly. By the mid 1990’s the reports increased up to 5,800 reports yearly. The reasoning behind demanding a dowry, and killing off your wife if she doesn’t come through to give you one, is simple: people want money, they see all of these favourable possessions others have and they want them for themselves. Now clearly the act of setting someone on fire is an obvious form of attempted murder. Usually when someone says something is wrong one of the reasons would be that it’s unnatural, which is the same in this case. Pouring gasoline over someone and setting them on fire is much different than a lion hunting a deer for food. Secondly, it’... ... middle of paper ... ...ws broken. Lastly, it continues to show to other Indians that the worth of men are more important than women. This is an important issue because men and women in India are very unequal, this is already known to most people out there. Bride burning does not, at all, help this issue, also since it’s getting worse each year. As well as that, it promotes injustice towards women. Since it is getting worse, more people must be coming to this conclusion when their wife’s family refuse to give a dowry, which means the idea is spreading. A way to fix this would be to report all cases of bride burning. An article from the Telegraph website proves that approximately 17 women get burned daily, but not all cases are reported. More people would get punished if more cases were reported, which would lead to other people realizing what they could get into, and not doing it at all.

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