Taliban ban on educating women aggravates plight of child brides

According to UN Women, child marriage has increased by 25% since the Quranic students took power. Given the risk of seeing them married to a combatant, families prefer to arrange the wedding. The broken dreams of Amina and Musal, and the “humanitarian, educational and professional” crisis of an entire nation.

Kabul () – Amina (her name is fictitious) was attending secondary school when the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan, depriving her a few weeks later of the right to education with the imposition of the law prohibiting girls over 12 years of age are educated in a school. As reported by a report by Radio Free Europe (Rfe/Rl) – which hid her true identity for security reasons – the regime interrupted her dream of continuing her studies and laying the foundations for a future job. That is why her family, originally from the central province of Maidan, decided a few months after her to force her to marry a 37-year-old man.

Amina was “traumatized and sick” when she was informed of the family’s plan, which “was at risk – as she herself, who is now 16 years old, says – of being financially ruined when the Taliban took power.” Her husband paid a “walwar”—a premarital fee given to the parents of his future wife—of approximately $12,000, a common practice in Afghanistan that provides an incentive for parents to marry off their daughters at an early age. early.

Amina is one of thousands of minors forced into marriage since the Western-backed government fell in August 2021, and the Taliban’s ban on educating women has resulted in an increase in early and child marriages, in a context of humanitarian, educational and professional crisis. Like her, Musal (her name is also fictitious) was 15 years old when her family promised her to marry an older man. The young woman, who is now 17 years old, dreamed of being a doctor, but ended up getting married under pressure from her parents, who often prefer to arrange the wedding due to the risk of seeing them married to a Taliban fighter, an alternative that they consider much worse.

According to UN Women, the United Nations agency for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, child marriage has increased by around 25% since Quranic students took power.

The drama of child brides is directly related to the school emergency and the decision taken by the Taliban to prohibit girls over 12 years of age from attending school. The consequence of this measure is that at this moment there are nearly 1.5 million women deprived of the right to education and without hope for the future. Coinciding with the “symbolic date” of the thousand days – and three billion hours of class – of school lost for girls, Unicef ​​​​made an appeal to the international community warning that “no country can progress” when “it stops back half of its population”. And in order to study these they have to resort to “secret schools” putting their lives at risk.

Catherine Russell, director general of the UN Children’s Fund, explains that “for 1.5 million girls this exclusion” not only constitutes a “flagrant violation” of the right to education, but also leads to “increasing opportunities.” limited and a deterioration in mental health. “The rights of children, especially girls” cannot be “hostages” to policies or visions related to ideology, adds the expert, according to whom “their lives, their future, their hopes and their dreams” are at stake. . Education, he concludes, “not only offers opportunities, but also protects girls from the scourge of early marriage,” which is why he calls for “all” children and young people, regardless of their gender, to be able to ” immediately resume his studies.

The same concern is shared by activists from Human Rights Watch (HRW), who consider that Afghan society and the country itself “will never be able to fully recover” from the loss of such a significant number of future professionals. And this is even more true in a country where there was already a low literacy rate for youth and women. The UN accuses the Taliban of imposing a kind of “gender apartheid” and considers their government to be a “cemetery of buried hopes.” That is why some of them, the bravest or in any case those who do not resign themselves to the current reality, resort to “clandestine” schools, hidden from the Koranic students, to be able to receive a minimum of education, risking their lives in structures with “limited resources” of teachers and materials.