According to the Acid Survivors Foundation in Bangladesh, the country has reported 3000 acid attack victims since 1999, peaking at 262 victims for the year of 2002. Rates have been steadily decreasing by 15% to 20% since 2002, with the amount of acid attack victims reported at 91 in Bangladesh as recently as 2011. Bangladesh acid attacks shows the most gendered discrimination, with one study citing a male to female victim ratio of 0.15:1 and another reporting that 82% of acid attack survivors in Bangladesh are women. Younger women were especially prone to attack, with a recent study reporting that 60% of acid assault survivors are between the ages of 10 and 19. According to Mridula Bandyopadhyay and Mahmuda Rahman Khan, it is a form of violence primarily targeted at women. They describe it as a relatively recent form of violence, with the earliest record in Bangladesh from 1983.
In societies like Bangladesh’s, where women are typically treated as property and lacking agency, acid attacks are often perpetrated by men who become enraged after women rebuff their requests for relationship or marriage. One study showed that refusal of marriage proposals accounted for 55% of acid assaults, with abuse from a husband or other family member (18%), property disputes (11%) and refusal of sexual advances (2%) as other leading causes. Additionally, the use of acid attacks in dowry arguments has been reported in Bangladesh, with 15% of cases studied by the Acid Survivors Foundation citing dowry disputes as the motive. The chemical agents most commonly used to commit these attacks are hydrochloric acid and sulfuric acid.