The victim of what some newspapers described as Britain’s “first fatal acid attack” died last month in a Belgian hospital. Mark van Dongen, a 29-year-old civil engineer from the Netherlands, had been splashed with acid in an incident in Bristol 16 months before, leaving him paralysed from the neck down and minus a left leg, an eye and an ear. Globally, he wasn’t a typical victim. Neither, to cite another British example, is Samir Hussain, a 28-year-old shop worker, who had acid thrown at him by two men as he left a cinema in Crawley, Sussex, burning and scarring his face, neck and right arm. In the first case, the victim’s former girlfriend, Berlinah Wallace, denied an initial charge of throwing a corrosive fluid with intent to burn, maim, disfigure, disable or cause grievous bodily harm and has now been charged with murder. In the second, the two assailants pleaded guilty this week at Brighton crown court; one was given a two-year conditional discharge and another awaits sentencing.

What makes Van Dongen and Hussain atypical victims is gender. The total number of victims of acid violence is hard to estimate, even roughly, but there are thousands every year and women are disproportionately affected almost everywhere. The nations with the highest recorded levels include Colombia, Uganda, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal, with the south Asian countries in particular producing unforgettable images of disfigured women who have been assaulted with acid because they have rejected sexual advances or marriage proposals, or aroused jealousy, or in some way or other inconvenienced the patriarchy and aroused its ire.

Think of the process: the quiet purchase of a small bottle of sulphuric acid; the assailant’s hand clutching it in his jacket pocket; the bottle’s quick retrieval, the cap flipped off; the intended victim’s puzzled look as what appears to be water hits her face; the seconds of confusion before the scream. How can anyone do it? To pull a gun or a knife would surely be less heartless and depraved. What the acid-thrower intends is to ruin a human face for ever – to satisfy his grievance, to make his target lonely and suicidal, and to demonstrate to others the consequences of her alleged misdeeds.

The question first came alive for me in the Indian state of Bihar in 1980, at a town on the banks of the Ganges called Bhagalpur where police had blinded more than 30 prisoners by pouring acid into their eyes and poking at their eyeballs with needles and bicycle spokes. It was a scarcely imaginable act of cruelty in a modern democracy during peacetime (or perhaps anywhere at any time, in peace or war). Indira Gandhi, then India’s prime minister, told India’s parliament that reading about the events in Bhagalpur had made her physically sick. The blindings had gone on, intermittently, for several months and there had been little attempt to keep them secret: the victims were low caste and often small-time criminals, and the town, when it came to hear of their barbarous punishment, largely applauded. How could it?

What little official shock and disapproval there was had very little effect on the ground. It took 21 years to send two lowly policemen to jail. One or two others were briefly suspended. The then superintendent of police now represents a Bihar constituency as a governing party MP. Lethargic inquiries, corruption, concealment, bureaucratic cock-up: perhaps all these could be expected in what was one of India’s most lawless places. The more surprising thing, as revealed in a fine new documentary by the Delhi journalist Amitabh Parashar, is that the events of 1980 popularised blinding by acid as a local punishment. As a local lawyer, RK Mishra, says in the film: “People got inspired by the Bhagalpur case … forcible blinding is growing day by day.”

Mishra has acted pro bono for victims for 37 years. Village renegades, unsatisfactory wives, girls who steal crops from the field: all have been held down and had acid poured into their eyes. A local civil rights activist in the film tells Parashar that blinding has a more “demonstrative effect” than killing: in Parashar’s words, the public sees someone who “dies every single day”.

As the 19th century wore on, the crime developed a name: vitriolage

The psychological roots of this cruelty may be unfathomable. The means are more easily traced. Acid is easily obtained even in the most rural parts of India – from motorbike and generator batteries, solvents and cleaning fluids. The most commonly available type is sulphuric acid – a highly corrosive liquid first manufactured on a large scale in 18th-century Britain, where it was known as oil of vitriol and used in many manufacturing processes. The first vitriol factory was established on the Thames at Twickenham in 1736. Others followed in Birmingham and at Prestonpans near Edinburgh, which 40 years later had become the largest in Britain.

‘Acid is easily obtained even in the most rural parts of India.’ Laxmi, who survived an acid attack in India at the age of 15. Photograph: Teri Pengilley/The Guardian

In Scotland, vitriol replaced or supplemented sour milk and citric acid in textile bleaching and dyeing at a time when linen and cotton were Scotland’s largest manufacturing industries. The Prestonpans factory was eclipsed by an even greater one – for a time it boasted the world’s highest chimney – that made bleach and sulphuric acid on the outskirts of Glasgow; and it was in Glasgow that some of the earliest cases of acid violence were recorded.

A Glasgow newspaper, the Reformers’ Gazette, noted in February 1834 that a Hugh Kennedy had been hung for throwing vitriol “wilfully and maliciously” on the face of a fellow servant while he slept. Kennedy’s victim had woken in agony, “one of his eyes being literally burned out!” The Gazette grieved to say that the crime of throwing vitriol had become so common in the Glasgow area that it was “almost a stain on the national character”. No punishment could be too severe for the culprits. “We would have their arms cut off by the shoulders, and, in that state, send them to roam as outcasts from society, without the power of throwing vitriol again.”

As the 19th century wore on, the crime developed a name: vitriolage. Despoliation prompted by jealousy and rejection was often the motive. Women threw it at other women, men at men, men at women, and women at men. It was common enough, as late as 1938, for Graham Greene to have his sinister protagonist Pinkie carry a small bottle of acid in Brighton Rock. (“He took the cork out and spilled a little on the wooden plank of the pier; it hissed like steam.”) Only later in the last century did the crime begin to be associated with the developing rather than the developed rather than the developed world, as a function of male oppression and feudalism, rather than the green-eyed cruelty of richer societies.

A final, frightening irony is this. Britain, the country that more or less invented vitriol, now has a growing incidence of acid violence that, according to Jaf Shah of the London-based charity Acid Survivors Trust International, may give it one of the highest per capita rates in the world. In 2015, the police recorded at least 408 incidents [paywall] where a corrosive or noxious material was used as a weapon; the figure for the first six months of last year was 340. Official records collected since 2010 do not include the ethnicity of most perpetrators and victims, but do tell us that most are men. Of those whose ethnicity was recorded, a majority were white. Savagery knows no cultural boundaries.