Rehabilitating acid attack victims must to deter crime: Laxmi

Underlining the importance of rehabilitating acid attack victims in tackling the crime, survivor Laxmi Saa today said making the victims emerge stronger than before and help them continue with their lives are a must to deter such acts.
Laxmi, who survived acid attack in 2005, said if the victims are rehabilitated and helped in beginning a new life the attackers would be scared.
"If you want to stop a crime, rehabilitation is very important. When he (the 32-year-old man who threw acid at her) comes out after serving his sentence and you ask me if I will be afraid? I will say, I am not," she said.

She said because "I have has been rehabilitated and has started the life afresh the attacker would be scared of me".
"I have been rehabilitated. The person I was in 2005, who was attacked with acid (with the attacker) thinking that once my face is disrupted, I will lock myself within the four walls. But the opposite happened...Something that he never imagined," she said.
Laxmi, who was speaking at the first ever National Women's Parliament here, said the process of healing a victim needs to begin at home.

"For this change to happen, we have to start at our homes and not think about what others will think," she said.

It is the struggle of starting a new life all over again, Laxmi said, that is most challenging for an acid attack victim, because "getting a job with such a face" is very difficult.
"Once the accused is sentenced, it is assumed that justice is done, but what about me?" Laxmi asked as she narrated the ordeals she faced in landing herself a job after the attack.
Having come up with 'Sheroes' cafe in Agra, the only cafe run by acid attack survivors, Laxmi said "the notion of beauty is extremely primitive" in our country, where only a good-looking face is considered "beautiful".

She went on to say how she was refused job at a call centre, where she "would only have to talk over phone".
Laxmi, who is now married to a fellow activist and is a mother of a child, was attacked by a 32-year-old man when she was just 15, who wanted her to marry him.
Four years after the crime, the attacker was sentenced to 10 years in prison.