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bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb In September , I received a phone call from Bina inviting me to an event honoring television journalist Connie Chung and her ABC / team for the Amnesty International Media Spotlight Award.1 Chung and her team were receiving this award for the report “Faces of Hope,” which had aired nationally in the United States in November  and featured the experiences of two young Bangladeshi women, Bina Akhter and Jharna Akhter. The event was hosted by ABC producers and would take place at the Yale Club in New York. A number of Bina’s friends had been invited. “It would be my pleasure,” I told Bina, “to see my old friend, and to witness such a momentous occasion honoring her story.” Bina and Jharna (no relation to each other) would be flying in from Cincinnati, Ohio, where they lived with their American host family. “Faces of Hope” had reported on a growing epidemic of acid attack on women in Bangladesh. It informed the American prime-time viewers that the incidence of acid throwing had become highly prevalent among lower socioeconomic groups in both Bangladeshi urban and rural areas. The reporters also noted that the perpetrators were mostly young men and adolescent boys, whereas the targets were primarily females between twelve and twenty-five years of age. While this profile of targets and perpetrators was accurate in the late s when ABC produced its report, in early  there had been a dramatic change. By , acid throwers of both genders were attacking women, children, and even men. Nonetheless, in the late s as well as , females were overwhelmingly the victims of acid throwing , attacked for reasons ranging from rejection of sexual advances, refusal of marriage proposals, family or land disputes, vengeance, and unmet dowry demands (UNICEF ). “Faces of Hope” had an angle expected to give it immediacy for the American viewers. The / report focused, in particular, on the compelling story of a courageous young girl, Bina Akhter, whose strength and tenacity facing unimaginable 18 From Dhaka to Cincinnati Tracing the Trajectory of a Transnational Violence against Women Campaign ELORA HALIM CHOWDHURY 258 Ch018.qxd 11/3/06 5:18 PM Page 258 FROM DHAKA TO CINCINNATI 259 trauma left the television audience stupefied. The story also peripherally focused on Jharna Akhter, another young girl who had acid thrown at her face. Connie Chung’s visit to Bangladesh preceded only by a few days Bina’s and Jharna’s coming to America, sponsored by a U.S.-based organization called Healing the Children. It had arranged for the Shriner’s Hospital in Cincinnati to donate surgery for the seventeen- and fourteenyear -old acid violence survivors. The narrative culminated in the momentous journey from Dhaka to Cincinnati, leaving its intended American viewers with the promise that the girls, extricated from the oppressive lives in Bangladesh, were being transported to good hands and on their way to recovery. I arrived at the Yale Club promptly at  P.M. The plush interior and leather sofas were in stark contrast to the surroundings and circumstances in which we, Bina and I, had met last. Bina was a strong, vocal leader in the campaign against acid violence in Bangladesh. When I had last seen Bina in —then fifteen—in Dhaka, she was helping to create a network of female survivors of acid attacks, women’s rights advocates, local journalists, doctors, lawyers, and even members of the Bangladeshi government. Two years later, following her medical treatment and residence in Cincinnati and the showing of the / report, Bina held center stage in New York in a gathering of Western philanthropists, international journalists , and human rights actors. Amid the Yale Club’s plushness, Bina alone represented , very skillfully, a cause that had always been hers, but now with a slightly different twist and for a different set of actors and audience. Indeed, she alone was presented to this room of New York influentials as the spokesperson of an issue that had a complicated genealogy involving the efforts of manifold collaborations and institutions that spanned the divides of time, geography, and history. Several speeches were made during the course of the afternoon. In her speech, Bina profusely thanked, first, ABC Television for drawing the attention of the international audience to such a crime against humanity; second, Healing the Children for sponsoring her and Jharna in their road to a new life; third, Shriner’s Hospital for nursing them back toward a healthy existence; and, finally, the development workers and the...

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