A 45-year-old man married a six-year-old girl. Even the Taliban stepped in and stopped the guy from taking the little kid home.
Despite the interference of the Taliban, the marriage still stands. It’s legal.
45-year-old Afghan man marries a six-year-old girl
The man, who already has two wives, bought the young girl from her family. Paid cash. The whole thing went down in Marjah. Cops arrested the father and the groom; however, nobody got charged.
Things have just gotten worse for girls since the Taliban muscled back into power in 2021. With women banned from schools and jobs, families are getting desperate (thanks, Taliban), so now more girls are being married off young, sometimes before they even hit puberty.
Child Brides in Afghanistan: What do the statistics say?
UN Women dropped some grim stats last year: child marriage shot up 25%, and childbearing for these girls is up almost 50%. Afghanistan’s now right up there as one of the worst places in the world for child brides.
The International Criminal Court finally called out Taliban bigwigs, saying their war on women and girls is a crime against humanity. Haibatullah Akhundzada and Abdul Hakim Haqqani got hit with arrest warrants. Taliban’s response? Big shrug and a rant about the West attacking Islam.
Meanwhile, these marriages wreck girls’ lives. Early pregnancies, abuse, depression—pick your poison. Most of these girls don’t get a choice. Some get ‘named’ for a cousin right after they’re born, like they’re livestock. And then there’s walwar—the bride price.
The groom’s family shops for a girl based on looks or health, and hands over cash or whatever. Mahbob, who does community work, told The Afghan Times that in her village, selling your daughter is just survival.
Then there’s this baad thing—families swap girls to settle feuds. The girl gets handed over, becomes the new family’s “honor,” and if her husband croaks, she can forget about choosing her next partner. She’s just passed to another male relative.
Amiri, a middle-aged mom from Uruzgan, straight-up admitted she married off her 14-year-old to a guy almost twice her age for 300,000 Afghanis. “She was too young, but we were starving,” she said. The money put food on the table. That’s the reality there.
There’s no real legal age for girls to get married anymore. The old law said 16, but that’s out the window now. It’s all up to how folks interpret Islamic law. In the Hanafi tradition, puberty is the green light.
No high school, no college, no parks, no gyms, no jobs, can’t even show their faces in public. Taliban says if a woman’s face is seen by men, she “loses her value.”
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