KAMPALA, UGANDA -- “I still remember it like it was yesterday,” says Ritah Ssanyu, 24. “I heard loud footsteps behind me. He caught up with me, grabbed my arms and shouted, ‘Gwe! You!’”
“Then, he turned around and poured something on my face.”
"That is how the acid works. It moves inside, consuming you. "
When her face began to burn, she realized it was acid.
“I screamed in pain. Acid burns immediately. It is like when you light a piece of paper and how fast the flames consume it. That is how the acid works. It moves inside, consuming you.”
Ssanyu is among a growing number of Ugandan women affected by these gruesome attacks. A member of the Acid Survivors Foundation of Uganda, ASFU, she now works as a counselor for other survivors. Statistics from ASFU indicate that 370 cases of acid attacks have been reported in Uganda since the foundation was founded in 2003. And while acid attacks have long been confined to developing countries, a recent spate of acid attacks in the United States in September has focused new international attention on the issue.
According to research from the United Nations, acid attacks are most commonly used as revenge crimes. Women account for 90 percent of all acid attack victims and relationship problems remain the primary reasons for the attacks. In Uganda, just one organization is in place to help victims pay for medical treatment, receive counseling and job training after their attacks. But discrimination and a lack of legal support to punish acid attackers have left hundreds of victims in Uganda without justice. Advocates are currently lobbying for increased police attention and new policies to monitor the sale of acids commonly used in attacks. Sulfuric and nitric acids are most commonly used because they are easy to get and sale and use is unregulated.
With the weapons easy to acquire and punishments nonexsistent, acid attacks are on the rise here. From March to May, ASFU recorded 15 new acid attacks in Uganda.
The Attack: Before and After
Like many acid attack victims, Ssanyu knew her attacker. “It was a guy I knew from high school,” she says. “He had wanted to date me and I turned down his advances. He had promised to do something that we both would regret.”
When she ran into him just a year out of high school on the evening of May 26, 2006 on her way home from a class at the Uganda Institute of Communication and Information Technology, where she was a first year student, she says he was rude and acted strangely.
“I asked him what he was doing [there] and he rudely responded that I thought I owned the whole of Uganda,” she recalls. “There was another person lurking, but at that time I thought nothing of his presence.”
She turned to walk down the dirt path to her house. “It all happened so fast,” she says. “I only realized it was acid when I felt the burning. People heard my screams and came out. Someone poured water on my face.”
After Ssanyu’s attack, she was taken to Mulago Hospital, where she stayed for five weeks.
At first, doctors thought she was blind, but after two weeks her right eye opened and then her left. After skin grafts and an operation on her eye, she was discharged and moved in with her aunt in Entebbe, some 20 miles away from her home in Kampala. She underwent four more operations over the course of the next year.
