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.

  • protist
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    1 month ago

    If this is what did it for you, you’re going to hate the entirety of human history.

          • dactylotheca@suppo.fi
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            1 month ago

            I don’t think we as a species have it in us to not be pieces of shit. Individuals absolutely do, but I’m not very conviced we’ll manage to unfuck our plains ape selves before things go really sideways due to climate change and resource scarcity, and we revert back to a more “natural” state

            no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

            (yes that’s Hobbes. No I’m not sorry.)