In the last post, I spoke a bit about women's rights to control their own contraception, which is currently under debate.
Now, for a place where women have no control over their lives or their bodies:
"Shakila, 8 at the time, was drifting off to sleep when a group of men
carrying AK-47s barged in through the door. She recalls that they
complained, as they dragged her off into the darkness, about how their
family had been dishonored and about how they had not been paid....Shakila’s case is unusual both because she managed to escape and because
she and her family agreed to share their plight with an outsider. The
reaction of the girl’s father to the abduction also illustrates the
difficulty in trying to change such a deeply rooted cultural practice:
he expressed fury that she was abducted because, he said, he had already
promised her in marriage to someone else."
-NYTimes, "Afghan Girls are Penalized for Elders' Misdeeds"
The local society justifies the trading because its seen as a way to stabilize family feuds, ya know, barring the whole kidnapping and forced marriage part.They argue that the girl, who was considered a burden on her parents will suddenly transform to a valuable asset, now that she has married a man much her senior, but reports differ, and the women are commonly beaten into submission and treated lower than servants. Her parents cannot take her back, now that she is 'damaged goods' and would violate the terms of using her as their debt payment. The local government outlaws the practice, but has little power to enforce, and ramifications are serious if you contact outsiders to plead your case.
This story is not the worst of its kind, but it reminds us that in many places, being female means lacking the agency for your own life decisions and being someone's property.
It would be easy to dismiss the current debate over contraception as isolated incidents, but they are part of a larger, more pandemic problem where women are considered unworthy of equal treatment.
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