A violent and unsavory milieu fills one with a strong sense of antipathy and human frailties. If you just watch horror movies twenty-four/seven, you will acquire violent attitudes. If you hear heresy, foul languages and vitriol, you will become inured to them, and if you watch people involved in a spate of moral wickedness such as honor killing, defaming the reputation of modest women, preying on simple girls to satisfy their carnal desires, etc. you will be affected mentally and emotionally.
Men are highly susceptible to environmental factors. It is believed that with watching carnage and tragic scenes, a persistent sense of nightmare will haunt you. You will lose your hope for living. However, if the scene repeats in your surroundings, you do not only become used to it but will also feel like engaging in the same activities. With murdering first person, your hands will tremble with fear and your conscience will be shaken, but the more one gets involved in inhuman acts, the crueler s/he will get. Gradually, criminal acts will whet their appetite for cruelty and immoral practices. The life story of Shirin Gul, a notorious killer who is imprisoned in Nangarhar province, substantiates this fact. She is in the 12th year of a 20-year prison sentence for a killing spree that claimed the lives of 27 men.
When Shirin Gul confessed to murder in 2004, she told investigators that she had lured her victims to her home with the promise of sex. There, she said, Rahmatullah, her son and several other men helped her poison and strangle the victims. Their bodies were buried in the courtyards of two homes the family kept, one in Kabul and the other in Jalalabad. The dead men’s cars were stripped of license plates and sold along the border with Pakistan and in Khost Province.
Shirin Gul was born in the Shewa district of Nangarhar Province, in the east of the country. She says that her parents died when she was 2 and that relatives married her off to an older man when she was just 11. Her husband, who was a colonel in the communist government, beat her and mistreated her, she said. One of her cousins, Rahmatullah, the driver for a Taliban strongman, visited the family often.
The more Rahmatullah visited, Shirin Gul said, the closer the two became. He brought food and gifts to the house, sometimes just for her.
Eventually, he told Shirin Gul’s husband that he was in love with her and that he planned to take her away. The husband, fearful of resisting Rahmatullah, conceded. It was then, she said, that she and Rahmatullah decided to kill her husband.
If we ponder over Shirin Gul’s life, she was bereft of compassion when her mother left her behind and she was coerced into marrying an older man – who treated her fractiously. Seemingly, her life was replete with violence and anguish. Finally, she succumbed to a man’s sexual desires expressed under the guise of love and plotted to kill her husband. Therefore, it is believed that coercion and lack of sympathy led to forming a lump in her throat and filled her with a sense of aversion and revenge. The puissant sense of revenge outweighed her humanity and virtue and she resorted to violence as a result of being treated violently.
Additionally, financial problem was one of the major reasons behind her complicity. Those who live in slums covet the luxury edifices, sumptuous meals and wealth of the rich. On the one hand, their mouths water with fortuitous sight of flamboyant and stylish clothing of the rich and on the other hand, they suffer derogatory remarks on streets. To palliate their wounded hearts and painful feelings, the poor seek to get rid of hapless life at the cost of their religious beliefs and moral values. Therefore, they violate the rights and dignity of people without a sense of guilt.
It should be noted that domestic violence, which is rife among Afghan families, will change a woman, who is supposed to nurture human feelings, into a dangerous killer. Parental tussle and conjugal strife will affect the members of family psychologically. Suppose, when a girl is forced to live her whole life under the same roof with a senile man, or she falls prey to a gang rape and her character is besmirched in her neighborhood, the life will be meaningless for her and she would react with a fit of pique to give vent to all the injustice. A person in such a deplorable state is justified to yielding her anger. To put it succinctly, since her rights and dignity are trampled upon, she would not care to violate the rights of others and engage in crime and corruption.
We have to stop treating women as a pariah and stand aloof from violence. As long as there is a vestige of feeling that women are inferior, then we will never be able to perfect our social and domestic problems. Our fractious attitudes and conservative mentality towards women are really detrimental to our social and cultural structures. The propriety of practicing religious guideline and ethical code should not be underestimated. Since mankind is born with inherent rights and dignity, let them live freely.