Feeling devastated after seeing this news about Afghanistan

@Twinandatwoyearold on the off chance that you are actually interested.....

Probably because the relative had enough money for a dowry for a son's marriage but not enough to give large sums of cash to every one of their numerous relatives (Afghans tend to come from large, extended families) who are in dire straights. Or perhaps they didn't want to.

As for the father's actions, perhaps if you are going to arrange a marriage for your daughter you think it's better to do that with someone you know, a family member whose family you think will treat her well?. Or perhaps their wasn't much time to find someone before her appendix burst?

Obviously you think her father should just have let her die in agony. But humanity is comprised of generations of people who will do just about anything to keep their children alive so it's a minority view and something very few people would actually do regardless of what they claim when they are not actually in that position.

I have just reread the article and saw one of the vile fathers sold his daughter to his RELATIVE!!!

WTF! Why did the relative (who clearly has enough money to buy kids) not just help out his dying family member?

If said family member had paid the full amount he’d have taken the unwell child away immediately.

This is sick tbh. This culture is so far removed from my culture and values and upbringing I accept I don’t understand it. If they are prepared to do that to their own relative what would they do to strangers kids?

BBC extract-

‘I had no money to pay the medical expenses. So I sold my daughter to a relative," he says.
Shaiqa's surgery was successful. The money for it came from the 200,000 Afghani ($3,200; £2,400) she has been sold for.
"If I had taken the whole sum at that time, he would have taken her away. So I told him just give me enough for her treatment now, and in the next five years you can give me the rest after which you can take her. She will become his daughter-in-law," explains Saeed.’

Fair if I missed these stories. But selling daughters so young seems to be very particular. (And to be clear, I’m not saying Ethiopia is some bastion of women’s rights. I’m saying that people in most cultures would not consider selling their daughters into sex slavery)

You also leave out the Iranian leftists that joined with the Islamists to overthrow the Shah. They were discarded when no longer useful to the Islamists.

You’d think Western leftists would remember this, but they seem committed to making the same mistake

Oh please. The Americans spent years and billions of dollars arming and training the Afghan police and Army only for them to defect en masse to the Taliban the minute the Americans left. Like within HOURS.
Either those men secretly supported the Taliban all the time but were opportunistically taking US money, or they’re cowards who don’t care enough about their wives and children to fight for them.

And as for the fact that some men were desperate to get out along with the US soldiers, that depends on what they were afraid of doesn’t it? Maybe they were just afraid the Taliban would kill anyone who’d been involved with the US but that doesn’t mean they did kill everyone. Maybe the solution to stay safe was to change sides along with your arms?

But if you’re armed and trained and you won’t defend the government that’s paid you for years you don’t deserve much sympathy afterwards.

Soviets probably could have harshly secularized them as they did to other Muslim ‘stans’ so it’s maybe a pity America supported the Taliban. But even if the Taliban had been lined up and shot by the Soviets, they may not have ever abandoned their tribal mentality.

It’s funny that you are using these examples.

The US & the UK helped overthrow an elected prime minister in Iran which long story short, is part of the story of what led to today.

ISIS was born out of the chaos that happened after the invasion of Iraq.

It’s too simple to say “westerners are to blame” for any of these situations. That wouldn’t be the full story. They just weren’t innocent bystanders either. But obviously these groups and governments actions all mattered too.

In the Horn of Africa there are loads of reports of girls being sold into marriage. Sometimes the family marry them off just so the girl can be in a household with more food available.

The problem is men.

One day I’d love for women to come together across the globe to overthrow men. Imagine a world whereby women were in power. Instead of spending billions on bombs we’d plow that money for good, to eventually empower all women across the world.

My husband is a feminist. Probably didn’t realise until I gave him the label. His dad isn’t but he’d do his fair share of chores around the home. His dad didn’t blink at his wife working or having her own bank account. His dad didn’t realise that sending his daughters off to school was also women’s rights either. How far back in our society would we have to go back to fathers selling their daughters? Hundreds of years. That’s how far back these men are. No amount of aid or classes is going to change that mindset to get them up to speed. Unfortunately that’s why I feel we can’t accept them as refugees. You could give them absolutely everything but overnight they’re not going to see females as equals. Respect them walking down the street in skirts. Want them in positions in power.

They might not sell them off for abuse at the age of six. But they’re not going to do the bedtime routine whilst their wives go to night school are they?

I’m sorry, it’s a dreadful situation but we cannot fix this. We’ve got enough men in this country (of all ethnicities, religions and classes) to get up to speed.

A truly harrowing read and I feel absolute horror for the girls of that country. Last night I made a small montly direct debit donation to the Linda Norgrove trust which looks to be doing good work there in memory of their aid worker daughter.

https://lindanorgrovefoundation.org/

No, it wouldn't exist in its current form - before then, they had other issues. The country has had a long period of upheavals. The situation isn't quite that simple, too. And frankly, as the Iranian Revolution of the seventies shows, for example, western interference is not needed for a state to inflict repressive misogyny on its people. Ditto with ISIS, who I don't believe have any links to western governments, and are even more barbaric than Afghanistan.

I'm not sure you can blame selling girls into marriage, or sexually abusing prepubescent boys on westerners, either!

Ignoring the fact you are railing against a point I never made in the first place, the ridiculousness of your post lies in the fact that no, the Taliban in it's current form simply would not exist without the massive financial, military, logistical, and intelligence support the US lent them in the 70s & 80s.

Nowhere have I said I was more moral.

To be fair, I just looked it up, and in 2005 at least, apparently child trafficking (for work or sex slavery) was an issue in Ethiopia, both orphans and those with parents. It seems as though many of the parents were lied to and told their children would be domestic workers and given an education, so a little different to knowingly marrying them off, but you have to wonder if they didn't suspect...

But then Ethiopia is a country that also struggles with high levels of sex inequality and misogyny, ranking 125 out of 162 on the Gender Inequality Index.

I have to say, I missed the stories on Ethiopian families selling their daughters into sex slavery during that famine years ago. Takes a special sort of depravity to do this tbh

@Radarqueen honestly most hunter-gatherer societies are absolutely awful to women. It’s a human norm. Only largely industrialized societies have escaped this. The type of things that go on in tribal societies would make you want to throw up, and I’m not just talking about Pakistan.

We can rise above human nature … but it’s a rare and special thing and must be protected where it exists.

This is a good introduction to the subject

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Places-Between-Rory-Stewart-ebook/dp/B003GGSSX6/ref=sr_1_6?crid=2KKTHOMDCP0Y2&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.WO2UduVrS1jT0e4xGbcSzzFx-KK_TYH5X_rOGHVVtssqee1nwY6QieHdHpN37mnRtS11QEu_170vq26W0DxlwMgZoWDSYK9zrEStr85T_iS1qh4nHWZo5VA_EhSISv8ZWcUamUXctVvw34ECek7pwKSXK2v2cbBZ9emucwKtfCZgfeHuQ5DxoaAcEpUva_I0v9wtSs_eYlSP8JgbnK4CSLKpe-GzGBBvc5GLMdJbbAQ.mxDzJSjh8Ah8MMAzwPKGz4tZnOVPKE1yPiggluZF7Gs&dib_tag=se&keywords=Rory+Stewart&qid=1779275563&s=books&sprefix=rory+stewart+%2Cstripbooks%2C333&sr=1-6

Aid is a good idea in theory. How that aid is spent once it reaches a country where the government denies aid to women specifically on the basis of their sex is another.

As for the people saying "I would starve to death with my child before I did this" - would you watch your other children starve to death?

or you could kill one of your children and eat them? A lot less suffering involved that way…

When people stop the apologia for men selling their daughters into sexual slavery, then I'll stop saying that in that situation, I'd rather my entire family died - preferably while trying to escape.

People aren't 'flexing' (what a weird fucking thing to say) - they're expressing their feelings on an unbelievably abhorrent situation.

It’s often easier to virtue signal about foreign issues than identify and resolve the issues at home because it causes a very uncomfortable conversation around how we’ve been governed or people’s ideological beliefs being stretched.

Far easier to stick a towel around your face and yell anti Semitic chants on a jolly in London. Screw the working class white girls who are still being targeted and abused because it’s an uncomfortable conversation around per capita rates of offence (per capita is always ignored) of the demographic doing the crime.

@ThePieceHall so that helps one person, what about all the others? Yet you, sitting at home, are more "moral" than the journalist who is at least trying to tell the world the story.

Our aid budget was important too, and we keep cutting it. We were one of the few countries that met the 0.7% target and that was something to be proud of. Now nowhere near that. It's planned to reduce still further. I have seen several people applauding this on mumsnet. It's gross.

As for the people saying "I would starve to death with my child before I did this" - would you watch your other children starve to death? I'm not saying it's a good action, but maybe stop flexing about what you'd do in a situation you are blessedly unlikely to ever have to face.

@RingoJuice that's a simplification, not every society in the history of the world has repressed women in the way you describe. It may be inevitable post-agriculture and post-industrialisation but I would be wary of implying it is "natural" in the way you are.

What would happen if this journalist handed out money? Everyone would turn up making sadfaces about how they have no choice but to enable child rape, and the only thing stopping it is if someone journo gives them money.

Also a reminder that little girls are being sold into sex slavery in the UK. I think influencing the British Gov to stop it here is far easier than getting it stopped in Afghanistan. Though I feel that virtue signalling and sending a tenner to a charity in Afghanistan is easier than risking being called a bigot for standing up for raped girls in the U.K.

Here are transcripts of the torture and rape of British girls during my lifetime -

The rape gang inquiry (privately crowd funded) suggests it is still happening today. I believe you can still donate money to help British girls get justice.

transcripts.openjusticeuk.org/

www.stopgroominggangs.com/Home/Transcripts

www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/what-we-do/crime-threats/modern-slavery-and-human-trafficking

Extract - Children are found working in all of these situations, as well as in sexual slavery.
Many victims have been trafficked from overseas – frequently from eastern Europe, south east Asia, and Africa – and their exploitation often begins en route. British victims tend to have fallen on difficult times, making them vulnerable to the lure of well-paid work complete with decent accommodation, which proves a cruel lie.