A Refuge for Acid Burn Victims
This video from the New York Times about acid attack survivors in Cambodia is painful to watch, but excellent.
You often see acid attack victims begging in Cambodian cities, as their disfiguring scars make it difficult to find work elsewhere. The wounds are often shocking, but the surreal, plastic quality of the scars do not adequately convey the horror that caused them. In 2004, in a concrete-floored hospital room in Phnom Penh, a colleague and I sat silent on one of two rusting iron-framed beds. A few feet away, so close we could smell it, a doctor scrubbed with alcohol the blackened skin of a 31-year-old woman whose husband’s lover doused her with acid while she breastfed her daughter.
A few ounces of hydrocholoric or sulfuric acid hurled on the skin can burn down to the bone, dissolving skin, hair and eyes like tissue paper in the rain. Victims are almost always female, and in Cambodia, about one-third of the time, they are not even the intended target but an innocent bystander with the misfortune of being too close. Those who survive – and most victims do – face a long, painful recovery, often accompanied by blindness and permanent disfigurement. Attackers often aim for the face, as though to scour away the victim’s identity. Survivors say it feels like being burned alive. When such attacks happen in places with good medical care, or to people who can afford to be transported to such hospitals, patients are usually placed in a medically-induced coma to spare them the pain. In this dirty hospital room, with its unswept floors and bare iron beds, the unmedicated woman convulsed in silent agony. The doctor applied another dosage of antiseptic to a cotton pad and commenced his fervent scrubbing of her skin. Her feet beat together in a flutter of pain. Tears rolled from the swollen slit that was her right eye. She did not make a sound. Her head, arm, chest and neck were an expanse of dead skin and pus. Her hair was gone. Only a nub remained of her left ear. Her right breast, where her daughter had been nestled when they were attacked, was nearly dissolved by acid. The husband whose infidelity triggered this attack sat next to her with concern etched across his brow. His chest and face were scarred with burns from where her acid-soaked skin touched him when he picked her up. When the doctor left, the woman spoke.“It is difficult to explain, this pain,” she said softly, while my colleague translated. “I feel sympathy for my baby. I worry about her future.”At that moment her baby lay in an incubator in the children’s hospital, burnt raw like her mother. The month-old girl was the youngest acid attack victim rights workers in Cambodia had ever heard of. The acid dissolved her eyelids. We weren’t allowed to see her. I don’t know if she lived. You don’t hire an acid attack against someone you wish to kill. There are more efficient ways to do that. You throw acid on someone whom you want to see suffer, which is why they are often associated with spurned love. The unspoken knowledge in the room, while this burning woman convulsed with pain and her mangled baby fought for life, was that this was no accident of fate. Someone, somewhere, wanted exactly this.
