Dark Flowers: The Story of Self-immolation in Afghanistan

Various NGOs and women’s associations are trying to assist victims of gender-based violence by providing specialized training to medical staff working with female patients, establishing counseling services for traumatized women, and training for defence lawyers representing female victims of domestic abuse. However, many of these efforts focus on assisting women after they have either attempted suicide or have endured violence and trauma for months, even years. HAWCA is intending to create and distribute a multimedia prevention kit in three languages (Dari, Pashto and English) for vulnerable and abused women who may be contemplating suicide by self-immolation. This multimedia kit is essentially proactive in the sense that it will attempt to reach out to abused women who feel that they have no alternative but to commit suicide or to protest against their abuse by burning themselves.