The BBC ran a story today that will turn many who read it toward sympathy: “Bangladesh’s Acid Attack Problem” tells a brief story about the hundreds of people in that country who have had concentrated acid thrown on their bodies. Most of those victims are women, and they are most often victims because they refuse propositions for marriage or otherwise spurn would-be lovers. While the sheer numbers recounted may be relatively low compared with other crimes, the horror of these attacks is representative of the extreme gender disparity that still goes unchecked in some developing countries.

The stories in this article today are striking: a one-month old baby boy who had acid poured down his throat as retaliation against his mother now struggles for his life in intensive care. He’ll likely never be healed entirely. A young woman who, with her family’s support, refused a marriage proposal at age 12 to continue her schooling. She now lives with severe scars on her face. The boy she refused poured acid on her while she slept in order to steal her beauty, which in Bangladesh, the article suggests, is one of the only perceived assets a young woman has. In an instant, that boy’s flippant disregard for that young woman’s value altered the rest of her life.

It’s hard for many of us to connect our minds and hearts to this kind of horror without having seen it. It would have been for me, had I heard this story before traveling through the Indian sub-continent and seeing women with my own eyes who have suffered this fate. Some, I met with the aid workers I had joined on the trip, but there is one I will never forget. We were boarding a train in Chennai when a woman came into our car to beg for food or money. Her beautiful, dark South Indian skin was mottled with patches of an unnatural, bleached white – the remnants of scarring from an acid attack. She was obviously blind in both eyes. If I had to guess, it looked like her eye lids no longer worked, if they remained at all. Her teeth were visible where her upper lip had been burned away, and one of her arms was left about half the size of the other, having never healed properly after the attack. Few dark imaginations could come up with such disturbing imagery, and to think this was a living, breathing person walking next to me was almost unfathomable in the moment. This beautiful young woman had been entirely transformed by violence, and for what?

As I’ve told her story from time to time, I’ve come to realize that her face, and the faces of thousands of other women in the region, is the face of gender inequity. In an awful way, it is manifested as a physical reminder of the human corruption that leads men to abuse and subjugate women. Her horrible scars will likely never be healed, and her life as a beggar will not be pleasant, if she is still alive today. I hope that her story, and the stories told in the BBC article today, and the stories told by other survivors and advocates working with them, will be a call to conscience to governments and societies that allow gender inequity of any kind to persist. It is a fundamental violation of human rights, and of human community. Where it is allowed to persist, this horror is its eventual end.

The BBC article points out that there are laws on the books against these crimes, but they are not enforced. The Bangladeshi government is continuing to allow this injustice.