Scarred Rights: Analysing Acid Attacks through the Lens of Global Gender Justice and Human Rights Frameworks

Abstract

In this age of globalization, the legal and discussions of violence against women have moved beyond domestic issues and are now a major part of the discussion on international human rights. This paper examines the use of acid as a form of violence against women from both a gender justice and transnationalism perspective in order to understand how global connections influence social and legal systems and the public’s awareness about this form of gender-based violence. The development of global networks has allowed for the rapid dissemination of progressive / creative / righteous judicial standards (especially as articulated in CEDAW); however, these networks also show serious systemic inequities for local judicial enforcement. This paper provides a comparative analysis of the relationship between transnational human rights advocacy and the development of anti-acid violence legislation in India. Against this context, the more functional regulatory and statutory frameworks that have been effectively implemented in Bangladesh provide a basis for the research to explore the impact of transnational civil society organizations and digital advocacy networks in democratizing survivor narratives and destabilizing the deeply entrenched patriarchal epistemologies that lead to these atrocities. Furthermore, the paper will address on-going structural barriers to justice, which include the failure of governments to provide adequate socio-economic recovery to survivors and the lack of regulations on the commercialization of toxic substances in developing countries. Ultimately, by combining global normative standards with local empirical realities, this research seeks to demonstrate how intersectional policy interventions can be used to leverage globalization as a vehicle for actively transforming the lives of survivors and for fundamentally ending patriarchal violence in society.