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“My friend and I had eaten dinner and gone to sleep. It was 2:00 a.m. when her brother came into the room where we were sleeping. He woke me up and said ‘Come with me.’ iItold him ‘No, whatever you have to say to me, you can say right here.’ He started to tug at me to force me to come with him. He called out to his mother who said, to him ‘She’s going to tell everyone what you tried to do. Throw acid on her. even if she dies we’ll say we don’t know who did it.’”
Yasmeen’s family has undergone a great deal of hardship to pursue a lawsuit against her attacker and his mother, who advised him to throw acid on her when the girl was just thirteen years old. Conviction rates against acid-throwers have risen from 6 to eighteen percent after a new law was passed to criminalize acid throwing in Pakistan, but the details of Yasmeen’s case reveal just how hard it is to win justice in such cases. For more, please see the article for PRI’s The World, which was produced with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crises Reporting.