Feeling devastated after seeing this news about Afghanistan

People cannot understand this was the human default. It took centuries of work for the West to get to this point where we respect the rights of women and girls.

Afghanistan depicts how life was for girls for most of human history, if that depresses you, then you should do everything you can to protect your culture from people like that (the human default)

Actually in the West marriage was always relatively late: mid 20s for girls and late 20s for boys.

So it irritates me when naive Westerners assume that everyone, free of religious or political influence, would choose to live like we do. It is a huge failure, our inability to model the minds of other groups of people. In fact they are happy to trade their daughters to get some sort of advantage. If the West disappeared, the world would get so much worse it would look like hell.

Yes I would rather starve my 5yr old than sell her for sex so that her brothers could eat. I’m the monster.

It’s OK folks - Afghani women and girls will all be dead soon enough. iIf starvation doesn’t get them first, the Taliban banning women training as medics and women not being allowed to be treated by men (meaning no access to medical treatment) will.

I’m not religious (just look at what’s done in the name of religion) - but if there was such thing as evil, it comes in the shape of the Taliban.

When I think of the hopelessness and abandonment the women of Afghanistan must feel it makes me weep. And the fear and suffering of those children.

So it’s okay for Afghan men to sell their daughters then? Whats your fucking point

Oh yes, the western world is the reason that girls are being 'married off' (read: forced into sexual slavery) as children or young teenagers, and the sexual exploitation of prepubescent boys is normalised and embedded in society. That never happened before the evil western world got involved

Probably because they are trying to get away from the places the West causes no end of bother in.

Murder-suicides in order to avoid torture and unimaginable deprivations are not unheard of, through history. Some people will kill their children and themselves to prevent them being enslaved, raped, and tortured.

In WW2, a Jewish family:

"It was a miracle that my mother, who carried cyanide pills at all times for a family suicide (and she told my sister and me about it), did not reach the point where she administered the pills to us all." - source

And then on the other side of the war, the mass suicides in Demmin:

"In another case, a grandfather forcibly took away a razor blade from a mother who was about to kill her children and herself after being raped by Soviet soldiers and hearing of the death of her husband. After Soviet soldiers had raped a girl to death and shot her father, an aunt cut her daughter's and son's wrists as well as her own."

Personally, I think I would fall into the camp of preferring death, than to sell my daughter off like an animal to be raped and bred from the age of ten until her eventual (probably early) death.

Most countries (including many of Muslim majority) cut off ties with Afghanistan after the Taliban took back power and refuse to recognise its legitimacy. There’s only 17 embassies left in Kabul.

From the story in the link:

"The neonatal, or newborn, unit is the busiest. Every bed is full, some with two babies in them. Most of them are underweight and a majority are struggling to breathe on their own".

They are still making babies.

So why were they selling their daughters in 2015 and 2016 when there was plenty of aid? They’re probably only crying now because the price has fallen. Or for the TV.

Selling daughters into “marriage” as settlement for debts is a longstanding practice there. Here’s an article from 2016 about the same problem:
https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/en/reports/rights-freedom/reality-check-no-justice-for-women-in-ghor-province/
Some of the girls were beaten and murdered by their in laws.
This wasn’t caused by the Americans, and wasn’t even caused by their chaotic departure. It’s Afghan tradition. Let’s be honest about that.

I mildly wonder if you'you'd feel the same if she was your last living child after all her older siblings had starved to death.

The article makes it clear that many families are losing many children.

I still can't help wondering just how many people saying they'd rather all their children starved to death than got married, even too young, for a change at life, would actually make that decision. Very easy to say when your own child is tucked up sleeping and safe. I wonder how many of the people saying this have ever experienced months' long relentless hunger with no end in sight for themselves, never mind their children.

Gigantic amount of Western privilige going on here.

If the west is so evil why are so many people trying to move here….

You are absolutely right. Don't want to derail, but he could have easily sold one of his paired organs - the trade in human organs is rampant there and in the neighbouring Pakistan too.

I think on mumsnet, especially on the FWRs board, female posters are just as likely to decry the behaviour of those in the west. But let's face it - the common misogyny in the west, while pervasive and unacceptable, is of a much, much, much lesser severity.

Where it is severe, it's generally found in cults or extremist branches of religion that are not normalised within the broader society.

Let's talk about how the west fucked things up for the Afghans, the Iranians, the Palestinian. Let's delve deeper in how western mingling and its self appointed quasi dominion over these regions fucked things up for us all in the west, along with the Petrodollar!

It's called know your history. And fuck around and find out.

Please don't think for a minute that the regime change that is pushed by our ruling class has children's, women's or general human rights as its goal. Please.

P.S. I admire our soldiers and have no idea why would anyone want to do what they do - lack of gratitude or even basic respect for them is astounding.

Well, it doesn't matter what their wives and daughters think anyway - they're viewed as no more than livestock, and that aside, we can't hear what they'd think of it as they're so thoroughly oppressed they're not even allowed to speak to those outside their family.

Who knows, perhaps many of them would prefer that the husbands they were sold off to, who keep impregnating them via sex I have to believe isn't enthusiastically consented to, would die fighting the dictatorial government that has dehumanised them, rather than maintaining the status quo.

Then again, they're so immersed in the abject misogyny that 92% of the women think men are justified in beating their wives, so god knows. It's Orwellian - many of the women probably don't even have the ability to conceptualise having true autonomy, especially in rural areas.

Yes, it does. There seems to be a lot of focus threads on the wrongs of Islamic culture and the religion itself. There's no focus on the evils of the west. That's perspective.

Because on Mumsnet you only on human rights violations in the East.

Yeah, but it's more important and pressing to talk about 'them'. About Islam. Never about the shit show that is Evangelicalism.

Death or a life of daily sexual torture followed by death at a very young age from childbirth age 10?

That’s really interesting.

i read, I think it was Mary Beard in sexuality in Roman times and they had a similar vibe - so a man who had sex with lots of people (in the sense of sticking his penis in various orifices) was seen as hyper masculine

however the “receiving” man was considered feminine and it was considered degrading.

i think it was Julius Caesar where his enemies spread rumours he had been a catamite (ie taken part in homosexual sex as a receiver) to damage his political status.

the modern interpretation is that people are either heterosexual or homosexual or bisexual and people are not really categorised in society by whether they are doing the sticking or the receiving. (Obviously various options are available to help with the sticking should one not possess a penis of one’s own)

Here are some of those Afghan men who sought asylum in the UK because they are such victims, raping a British woman in her own home just a couple of weeks back.

https://news.devon-cornwall.police.uk/news-article/926f4799-0343-f111-9d93-6045bdd24049

I do not feel devastated at seeing any Afghan male pulling a sad face while he treats his daughter as a piggy bank.

I do feel sorry for the women if they denounce that culture and do not seek to recreate it elsewhere.