Child marriage in Afghanistan: “We have to give our 10-year-old daughter to survive”

Life for family Amina, a 10-year-old Afghan girlThings weren’t going well a year ago when American troops withdrew Afghanistan After Decades of armed conflict and the Taliban seized power. The difference between then and now Extreme poverty Where they are today, they brought the girl’s parents to a breaking point, where they had no choice but to make the most difficult decision of their lives, which they had never entered their heads until this moment. In exchange for money, he had to marry off his daughter to an elder.

“We don’t have enough to feed our children. We thought that if we sell our daughter, the rest of our children will survive.“, he said in a telephone conversation nation The girl’s father.

Amina comes from a family consisting of her father, a farmer who lost his job when the de facto government took over Kabul, her mother who works as a housewife and is a few months pregnant, and her five siblings. She is the eldest of three daughters. In his short ten-year career, Neither she nor her sisters went to school.

A decade ago, her mother kept her in her house located in the province of Batkis in the northwest of the country, and at that time the family enjoyed stability, as her father worked in the fields, which he assured was money. Didn’t give up, had enough to lead a decent life Food does not disappear from the table.

The family’s balance began to unravel when Amina was two years old. The impact of an unrelenting civil war in an unstable country with a weak economy took its toll on the conscript family and others. 3.5 million people, relocating to another safe place within the country. As time went on and the crisis worsened, her father decided to sell their house and other assets to pay off their debts and what they thought was a new home in a refugee camp.

The place was far from a comfortable haven. The room they lived in was only a few square meters in size and they all slept together on a mat on the floor. There are no institutions for children’s education or health facilities in the refugee camp.

“We would go through the garbage to find something to eat. Sometimes we eat once, other times we eat twice. Other times we went days without eating,” the family assured this media.

But now Amina’s father is in despair He lost his job after the Taliban government was installed. Economic income was reduced to zero, and finding a new job was impossible due to the country’s declining failure and the advanced age of the head of the household.

The suffocating reality faced the parents, and the only alternative they saw was to get seven members of their family out. Amina was about to get married. her husband, A 21-year-old youth working in IranWhile the sum of money agreed upon in the marriage arrangement provides a temporary solution to the impoverished economy, it can provide the woman with a better life.

“We cried uncontrollably. We didn’t want to sell it, but we had to. Amina was very upset and embarrassed”, lamented his mother in conversation nation.

Amina was rescued humanitarian organization Too young to marry (Too Young to Marry), which fights against child marriage in developing countries. France 24 reported that they were able to trace her gratitude just before the husband’s family completed the promised payments. The girl never came to her husband’s hand. The organization moved the entire family to an apartment in Herat, where they provide food and sanitation and education for all their children, including Amina, and work for their father.

“Both Amina and her brother arrived in Herat with severe diarrhea and terrible pneumonia. She didn’t want to talk, she was very closed,” they said. Nation Members of the organization. “Now he is happy. He says he loves living in a big house with his own room and is eager to start school. She says she wants to be a teacher or a doctor when she grows up.”.

On Saturday morning, Amina and her sisters attended their first day of classes, “beaming with happiness,” members of the humanitarian organization told this media outlet. “Their father went with them. Her eyes filled with tears of joy.”

During the training, the girls have classes in Dari Persian – the language spoken in Afghanistan – English, Quran, robotics, mathematics, life skills and introduction to art.

“I feel very good and I am studying to build my future,” the girl said after her school day. He promised that She enjoyed studying with other girls and her classmates.

A year after Kabul fell to the Taliban, the devastating situation in Afghanistan has left many children’s lives in tatters. More than 1 in 20 women, 5.5%, are forced into marriage to support their families in extreme poverty. According to a recent report by Save the Children, these cases are more common in female-headed households, which suffer from enormous financial pressures and impairments in their ability to lead the household due to strict anti-female laws imposed by the Taliban.

Women victims of forced marriage They are usually between 8 and 15 years old.and is often given to men three times their age.

Internal displacement in search of an improvement in quality of life puts children at risk, especially if they are separated from their parents or caregivers, who can become complicit in human trafficking networks.

The reasons leading to the decision to force women into marriage are not only economic but also the unpredictability of the future. To Young to Wet Regional Director Basir Mohammadi said Nation That The “fear factor” is a great motivator.

“Families fear that they will not be able to feed their daughters, protect them, provide them with a future. The future is uncertain as the Taliban marginalize women from society. Others fear that a member of the Taliban government will kidnap or rape them, because that will happen. So they want to marry them off.” , so that their husbands can protect them,” Mohammadi explained.

The truth is that there is no solution. The man Amina was to marry did not plan to educate the girl, but to be a housewife.

“Unfortunately, life after marriage is not good for women,” asserts Mohammadi. “They tend to sell them to adult men, most of whom have other wives and children the same age as the girls. In some cases, the families who buy the girls are in a slightly better economic position than the families who sell their girls, but they still suffer from economic hardship.