Taliban legalise marriage for nine year old girls.

[ArabellaScott]

https://www.thetimes.com/world/asia/article/taliban-afghanistan-child-marriage-women-rape-law-k8hcxr27n

https://archive.ph/0ruWp

'The Taliban have legalised child marriage and declared that the silence of a “virgin girl” who has reached puberty can be interpreted as marital consent.
According to an official document titled Principles of Separation Between Spouses, the government of Afghanistan has effectively removed the fixed minimum marriage age for girls by linking marriage eligibility to puberty.
It contains a provision that states the new interpretation of marital consent. In girls, puberty usually begins between the ages of eight and thirteen. The minimum age for puberty is nine, according the largest and oldest Sunni school of Islamic law.'

'Previously the legal age for marriage was 16 for girls and 18 for boys, according to Afghanistan’s 1977 Civil Code. Girls below 16 could be married with the permission of her father or a judge. Marriage of girls below 15 was criminalised in the landmark 2009 Elimination of Violence Against Women law.
“Under the new law, that age limit is removed,” Horia Mosadiq, director of the Conflict Analysis Network, said. “If a girl reaches puberty at the age of nine or ten, she is considered of a legal age to marry.”
International experts have emphasised that the law also legalises child rape.'
...
'According to estimates from Unicef, the UN children’s agency, 28 per cent of Afghan women aged between 15 and 49 were married before the age of 18. Where laws had previously acted as strong deterrence, because families feared legal backlash, the new legislation makes it more difficult for young girls to seek a way out of a forced marriage or use legal protections to prevent their families arranging their marriage.'

...
'Young girls can be given away in marriage to pay off family debts due to poverty or drug addiction, or used as bargaining chips in local conflicts.
“Child marriages have many different factors,” Shaharzad said. “It’s about poverty, lack of education … a lot of other structural issues that the Taliban have habitualised.'

...
'New regulations also have implications for older married women by making a separation impossible on most grounds. “You can’t easily get divorced from an abusive husband or an absent husband — you just have to live with it,” Akbar said. “The big message of this law is that you can’t get separated from your husband unless he consents to it.”'

Heartbreaking. Those poor girls. Those poor women.

Utterly horrific. It is so disturbing it’s an example of when the brain switches off to protect oneself, I just cannot articulate sufficiently just how awful this is.