[UA] Facial Mutilation

[Dylan Craig]

Interesting (if harrowing) article in the NY Times today:

>> Start:

"... In the past two years, there has been a horrific surge in acid attacks in
Cambodia, most of them carried out - in contrast to places like Bangladesh - by
wives against the lovers of their husbands. One local human rights group,
Licadho, recorded 20 such attacks last year in a sort of imitative mass
hysteria.

"The wife does not want you to die," said Maniline Ek, an American volunteer at
a women's shelter here. "They want you to live and suffer. It's torture. People
look at your face and they say, `Oh, she took someone else's husband.' " These
are battles among the oppressed, the harsh intersection of mutual tragedies -
woman against woman. In Cambodia, power belongs almost exclusively to men. The
philandering husbands are almost never the targets of attack. A local women's
aid group, the Cambodian Women's Crisis Center, recorded only one instance last
year in which a husband was the target. And it was the only instance in which
the attacker was tried and punished.

It is common in Cambodia for men - particularly men of power - to take an
unofficial second wife. The betrayal of the official wife is so familiar that
popular songs have been written about it. "Our society does not condemn the
men," said the director of the crisis center, Chanthol Oung. "It feels their
behavior is acceptable.... A government spokesman, Khieu Thavika, described the
attack as a personal matter "for the first and second wife to resolve."

>> End

Of course, this put me in mind of the Personamancer blast, and makes a good
example of what I would consider an interesting significant unnatural effect to
the use of the spell. You blast some enforcer: for the next two weeks, there's a
strange statistical anomaly involving facial mutilation through attacks like
this. A nice way of making the adept aware of the full extent their magickal
ripples can have.

--
"Where the sky meets the ground / where the streets fold round"
Dylan Craig · Writer and Observer · Cape Town, South Africa
Contact Details: http://www.eyeballkid.co.za/contact.html

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