A journalist and activist, Marvi Sirmed faces threats of violence in her home country of Pakistan, but has found safety and academic freedom through UConn's unique and longstanding partnership with the Scholars at Risk Network
(Illustration by Sean Flynn / University Communications)
In 1991 in Pakistan, there was a surge of women being burned.
A stove would burst, the official report would say - a terrible accident - and only the young bride of the family would be injured or, more often, killed.
"It was very intriguing for me," says Marvi Sirmed, a journalist and activist who was one of the rare young women working at a newspaper in Pakistan at the time. "When I started digging, first they said, 'Oh, you know, because in the kitchen, only the daughter-in-law works, so everyone else remains unhurt.'"
Most newspapers in Pakistan at that time employed only one woman, says Sirmed, and that woman was known as the "lady reporter" who would exclusively write for women. Articles about the latest fashions, or recipes, or romantic short stories were the sorts of topics that women in the patriarchal society should be reading, according to the men who ran the newspapers.
Sirmed, who was working as the editor of her newspaper's weekly women's edition, felt otherwise.
"I kept digging for four or five months for this story, and some of these incidents would be accidental," she says, "but most of it was because the daughter-in-law did not bring enough dowry. So, it was a dowry killing, or an honor killing, concealed into accident."
Her enterprising journalism was not welcomed.
