No Exit Here

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Although suicide is viewed in the West as an act of weakness, in China it can be considered, as Pearson puts it, "a demonstration of strength and conviction . . . a time-honored resort of women who have been maligned, dishonored, shamed, or wronged."

The same is true in Pakistan, where female suicide also is a growing problem. Here, too, the standard victim is a young woman living in the countryside, although in Pakistan, reports Child Newsline (June 3, 1999), the suicides more commonly precede arranged marriages. In the southeastern Pakistan province of Sindh alone, 60 to 100 girls and women kill themselves each month.

Female suicides are also up in Afghanistan, where women's lives have dramatically worsened since the fundamentalist Islamic Taliban took control of the government three years ago and forbade women to work. An anonymous doctor who spoke to Julian West of the International News Electronic Telegraph (May 17, 1998) confirmed that women's suicides had risen significantly.

Besides the social and cultural problems created by the Taliban's oppression of women, the regime has also created serious economic problems for the many Afghan families who once depended on women's incomes. In the capital city of Kabul alone, roughly 40,000 female civil servants lost their jobs. The number of street kids has doubled in the past few years as well, to an estimated 50,000 today. One psychiatrist told West that poverty was leading many Afghan women to commit suicide: "They have no bread, no food, nothing."

But in these and other countries ruled by fundamentalist Muslim governments, women don't have to kill themselves to get out of a tight spot--their male relatives will do it for them. Child Newsline reported an incident in which a man killed his sister with an ax when she refused to accept an arranged marriage, and The New York Times (June 20, 1999) detailed the prevalence of "honor killings" of unchaste women in the Arab world. Sometimes a rumor alone is enough to cost a family its honor; the only way to restore it is for a male relative to kill the offending female. "We do not consider this murder," a 22-year-old Jordanian man who killed his sister last year told The New York Times. "It was like cutting off a finger."

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