Afghanistan: Breaking the Cycle

Once an abuser himself, Ali Shahidy is now an ally for women and an outspoken advocate against gender-based violence in his homeland.

By Ali Shahidy

Gender violence plagues Afghanistan and my family is no exception. The patriarchal structure of our culture makes it rampant. The pervasive silence makes it everlasting. The pain of gender violence is a nightmare that haunts many Afghan families. My most tragic childhood memories are ignited every time my dad raises his voice in a violent way. The fear of seeing my mom beaten in front of my eyes incites panic. I was raised in a culture of violence. War was only part of it.

I wasn't only the son of a victim and an abuser. I became an abuser. The cycle of abuse continued as I began to beat my sisters and harass girls in the street. I used to restrict my sisters' mobility, their appearance, their associations, and more. Afghan customs taught me that the honor of my family was more important than the physical and psychological wellbeing of my sisters. I made vulgar comments and gazed salaciously at random girls in the street. I was following accepted cultural norms without shame.

During the same time, my younger sister, Roya, was forced to abandon school and marry against her will. She became another victim of domestic violence in her wretched and abusive marriage. Living in Iran, her life was a silent prison of suffering and pain. Her husband beat her during her pregnancy, threatened their infant son with a knife, and tortured her on a regular basis. His drug addiction fueled his rage. The scars on her hands and her drastic weight loss were the only things that spoke of her horror. Like my mom and many other Afghan women, Roya quietly and dutifully accepted her fate.

When we learned about the five years of Roya's suffering, we immediately took action. To rescue her, we were confronted with torrents of challenges -- financial difficulties, distance, laws that maintain gender norms, social stigma, and relatives who opposed and condemned us. These obstacles made me realize how wrong and devastating our culture was. It was the first time I studied about women's rights. I had to fight with Mullahs and our elders. I had to struggle with practices, beliefs, and values that filled my life since birth. When Roya's husband discovered our plans, the intensity of his violence escalated. Concerns about Roya's safety filled my thoughts at work, at home, and during my studies. Her life was in danger and I was her only hope.

I doubled my efforts, saved more money, learned more about women's rights, and gained the assistance of more friends. Finally, we brought Roya and her baby home. She was safe... and my world view had changed forever.

Reading and studying more about the plight of Afghan women, I realized that gender discrimination and inequality are wrongly ingrained in our culture. Everywhere I went I saw women like Roya -- women quietly accepting their fate. I knew I had a responsibility to fight for their rights and rescue them from their prisons. All women should have the same freedom as my sisters. Women should not be viewed as servants, property, or sexual commodities. Men are blind and need to be healed. Women's mouths are sealed and those seals must be broken. Violence is not a woman's fate.

I am strongly involved in advocacy work and fighting for women's rights. I am a vocal opponent of violence against women. I actively support victims and encourage people to talk about violence. Through speeches, global digital action campaigns, public awareness events, community discussions, and more, I am encouraging people to break the cycle of violence. Step-by-step, I am removing barricades and changing men's views towards women. Through tears and determination, my sisters and I changed our fate. We broke the cycle of abuse in our family.

Together, men and women will stand hand-in-hand, raise their voices, and challenge the dominant and parochial beliefs of our culture. Together we will end violence against women. Source

Modern Day Child Prostitution in Kabul, Afghanistan: Children are used as Sex Workers in Afghanistan to Serve Foreigners

When we hear about the news in Afghanistan, the mainstream media tells us stories of explosions and deaths of military personnel and civilians. A story that is not being told is of child prostitution slavery in Afghanistan.

“There is a police operation going on by a neighborhood police chief in Kabul that has girls working for him,” says German contractor Hans, who does not want to release his last name for security reasons.

“You know prostitution is legal in Germany and I don’t mind paying a fair price for a sex worker, but here in Afghanistan the prostitutes are children, teenagers and that is where I draw the line. I have a 14-year-old daughter back home in Germany and I do not condone child prostitution,” says Hans.

A 15-year-old named Badria Durrani says, “I was forced into prostitution because the police in the area said they will arrest my father. My father is just a baker and he does not want any trouble with the police, so I work as a prostitute having sex with foreigners because that is what the police want me to do.”

Badria’s father Mohammed Durrani says “I did not agree, but the police threaten to throw me in jail, so I agreed because I have to support my 3 wives and 8 children as a baker. With the extra income my daughter makes after she pays the police their 40% share, the rest of the money is for our family.”

“Also, the police told me not to worry. My daughter will only serve foreigners so Afghan men will not know that she is a prostitute and later she will be able to find an Afghan husband for marriage,” says Mohammed.

“I don’t want to do this anymore but what choice do I have? If I run away my father will be thrown in jail and then our family does not have money to pay for rent and will be kicked out of our home. I have to sacrifice my life for our family. I hate this government and these foreigners that come here to have sex with girls my age, but the government here is not protecting us. They send these police from the north of Afghanistan to take advantage of us,” says Badria.

A 12-year-old girl named Ara Atta says, “My father was killed by the Americans because he did not stop his car at a checkpoint, trying to take my mother to the hospital because she was going into labor. The Americans shot at the car and killed my father but my mother was not harmed and taken to the hospital and my brother Ibrahim was born.”

“The police told my mother that she will not receive my father’s retirement check for working at the Ministry of Agriculture unless I work as a prostitute serving foreigners. My mother at first refused but she relented once the police told her that I would be able to keep 60% of the pay and be able to keep supporting my mom and 6 brothers and sisters and the other 40% would go to the police,” says Ara.

Ara further stated, “I don’t want to do this but we have no choice. If I run away, the police will ensure that we will not receive my father’s retirement check. I curse them and the foreigners that are using my body for sex but I have to do this or my mother and siblings will go hungry and we will be out in the street because we don’t have money for rent.”

The invasion of Afghanistan by the United States and International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) offered the Afghan people democracy and social changes for women through education and new careers that were closed to them under the Taliban.

What has actually happened here in Afghanistan is that the government institutions that were established by the U.S. and ISAF, such as the Afghan Police, are using female children and women for profit to serve foreigners as their sex slaves.

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The Cost of Being a “Real” Pashtun Woman

By writing on Pashtun women’s plight with the hands of social stigmas, I am not arguing thatnon-Pashtun women are free of such problems. Rather, writing on such issues means that we have to find the courage to face the reality and speak up about it; to come out of a denial mode. Unless we speak out against our problems, we will not be able to think critically and find solutions for them. This piece is also not aimed at generalizing about Pashtun women’s social situation, since there are exceptions in everything and everywhere.

In 1774, Breshna, a woman from the Nasar tribe who is today popularly known as Khadai, got married to someone from the Slaimankhail tribe. After her marriage, a man, from her tribe, named Beeda Bara Khan Nasar didn’t let her go back to her in-laws. This infuriated the Slaimankhail tribe and they gathered an army of four thousand people and fought with the Nasar tribe in Zhob in southeastern Afghanistan. The feud started on the second year of Timur Shah Durrani’s reign and lasted for almost two centuries (1774-1951). The feud that was started by men because of men, today after two centuries, is blamed at Khadai. Khadai is considered the source of bringing bad luck, adversity and shame to the families involved, and is identified as the cause of the feud. And that is why when the Pashtun mothers swear at young daughters for misbehavior, they often call them “Khadai”. Her story is an example of how Pashtun women have suffered from the social guilt of something called bringing shame to the family. Among Pashtuns, this phenomenon is called sharam.

Sharam is the English equivalent of shame or disgrace. This term has usually been used in cases where honor is involved in the Pashtun society. When the honor of a person, family or tribe is jeopardized due to any kind of conflict of interest between individuals, the person causing the disrespect might be declared an outcast. The family or the tribe might disown such a person or not treat him/her a part of the family. To avoid bringing sharam to their families, men are usually expected to not involve in crimes such as theft, fraud, murder, and other criminal or negative behavior. An example can be sexually harassing women, such as by staring at them or following them; this might result in complaints from the victim’s side, and the harasser could thus cause disgrace to his family. 

The culture of avoiding shameful acts has backfired in different matters on the very people who abide by it. A person’s fear of causing sharam for his/her own personality and his family or tribe has limited or almost blocked the ways for people to liberate themselves and express freely that they have suffered from injustice, in most cases, with the hands of their own relatives.

Often times, women are the primary targets of this culture of sharam, a culture comprised of two sides of the same coin. A woman who speaks up against the injustice she has to endure or may have experienced is looked down upon in the community for either complaining or for being too “liberal” or “shameless” (be sharam) by disclosing the realities that should have remained secret. These be sharam women include those who say “no” to a forced marriage or choose husbands for themselves, women who confront their husbands over infidelity or second marriages, widows choosing to remarry out of their deceased husbands’ families, women who ask for their part of the property shared with their male relatives, women who choose not to live with their in-laws while their husbands are away abroad to earn living for the whole family, and women who ask for divorce. Such women’s names, such as Khadai’s, who is considered to be the cause of a two-centuries-long feud, are used as negative metaphors or as examples for cautioning young girls. On the other hand, if a woman silently bears all the injustice, especially domestic violence, and ignores her basic rights, she is praised for being a woman of character, tolerance and source of pride for her male relatives. A Pashtun woman is called asli Pustana-real Pashtun woman when she goes through much in her life without complaining and opts for not changing her own situation when she has an opportunity to do so.

There have also been instances of the lives of women in my village where they have been praised for keeping calm and quiet when faced with injustice from their relatives. People praise and refer to them as asli Pashtanay i.e. real Pashtun women, when they not only quietly suffer in their lives but also show being content during their adversities. Wana (not her real name) died of a heart attack in 2003 when, after trying in vain to become pregnant for fourteen years, her husband decided to remarry. Even though she did not like the fact that she had to share her whole life and most importantly her husband with another woman, she was celebrated as a heroine throughout the village for going out to ask for the hand of her husband’s second wife. Wana was a victim of depression, anxiety and finally a heart attack that took her life, just so she could keep the honor of her family, the name of her father, and the respect of her husband and be called an asliPushtana.

A twenty-three year old man from Kabul in Afghanistan who lived and worked in another city said that he was angry at his father for his decision to bring a second wife home. When the man’s mother came to know that he was angry at his father for remarrying, she called him and asked him to not only call and talk with his father but also send him the required amount of money so he can hold his second marriage ceremony. The man says his mother argued that it was a hugesharam for her and the whole family to start a brawl within the family because of her husband’s second marriage. She had told her son that there were so many enemies of her husband and his family and people were jealous of his status and position in the society; in order to maintain that, she could endure the miseries and disloyalty of her husband-of-more-than-two-decades and not bring sharam upon the family that could cause their jealous enemies some satisfaction of witnessing distress and conflict among the members the envied family. She was ready to deny her own rights and let her husband exploit her stand regarding the people jealous of her and her husband’s life and position.

Apparent from the above examples, women are held responsible for anything that goes wrong within relations and families. They therefore are very cautious about their status and character in the household and in the tribe so as not to cause any harm to the name of their families by being the reason of sharam for them. This is the main reason of discrimination and acceptance of violence against women in the society, the reason for nurturing social stigmas and paving ways for incidents of violence, such as rape, that go unreported. Moreover, women have been denying and sacrificing their own basic human rights in order to save the honor of their families in the society. They have created an environment where quietly becoming a victim is deemed noble.  They are lured into believing that they are honorable and decent if they tolerate injustice, that they are responsible for the honor and good name of their families, that they are, in fact, the ones to be blamed when anything goes wrong in family matters.

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Violence Against Afghan Women "More Extreme"

Following a spate of particularly brutal murders, Afghanistan’s minister for women has said attacks on women are becoming more extreme in nature.

This week, two men were arrested in the northern Kunduz province for beheading a 14-year-old girl, apparently because one of them had his marriage proposal turned down. The case came a month after the beheading of a 25-year-old woman in the western Herat province, and the mutilation and murder of a 30-year-old in the same province earlier in October.

Speaking on November 25, at an event to mark International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, Afghan women’s affairs minister Husn Banu Ghazanfar said a higher incidence of “extreme or brutal violence” had been recorded in recent months.

At the same time, Ghazanfar said the 3,600 cases of all kinds of violence against women recorded between April and July represented a fall on the same period in 2011.

"We have recorded some very tragic cases this year, though the numbers are lower than last year,” she said. “We are concerned.”

Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission, AIHRC, disagrees that the total numbers are down. Commission member Soraya Sobhrang has told the media that her institution recorded 4,000 incidents in April-October, 1,000 more than in the same period last year.

Violence against women often relates to matters of “honour” – perceived offences against a family’s reputation, often arising out of baseless rumour.

Kamela, a young woman from the eastern Nangarhar province, is now trapped in a marriage to a man about five times older than her, after suffering a cycle of violence.

When she was just 14, her father married her off to a 35-year-old man. On their wedding night, the husband discovered she had suffered sexual abuse from a cousin two months before – she had never said anything before because the man had threatened to kill her. Kamala’s husband beat and kicked her until she passed out, and sent her back home on the grounds that she was “immoral”.

Because father felt his honour impugned, he too beat her to a point where the family thought she was dead. Then she was confined in a barn with the livestock for four months until her husband divorced her.

After that, her father accepted 30,000 US dollars from a 78-year-old man who agreed to marry her.

"People are usually aggrieved with other people, but I am aggrieved at God. It would have been better if He hadn’t created me in the first place if I was fated to live with so much suffering,” she said. "Is there anything other than death that can help me?”

In theory, the Elimination of Violence Against Women Law, passed in 2009, should offer Kamela protection and redress. It covers the various things that have happened to her, outlawing a range of abuses from assault and rape to marriages that are coercive, involve minors or amount to a transaction between the families concerned.

Ghazanfar says translating this legislation into practice needs coordination between all government agencies, not just the women’s affairs ministry.

"There’s a long way to go to implement the law,” she conceded.

Qodsia Niazi, who heads the prosecution service department that deals with violence against women, says obstacles to making the law work include traditional values and attitudes, the general security situation, the impunity of the rich and powerful, and a shortage of female staff in Afghanistan’s legal and judicial institutions.

However, Niazi said, some prosecutions have been successful.

"We have dealt with 1,320 cases of violence against women since last year [ending March 2012], mostly concerning assault, harassment, coercion to prostitution, sexual abuse and mutilation," she said.

She argues that fair, well-publicised trials will serve an exemplary purpose.

"People have welcomed two public trials, one a case where a father sexually abused his daughter, and the other involving a man who assaulted and mutilated his wife before imprisoning her in a toilet for six months,” she said. “Such trials are very effective in reducing violence against women."

Others are less upbeat about the prospects for change.

"Has anyone who murdered a woman ever been executed?” asked Samira, a university student in the capital Kabul. “That makes it obvious that the government has no intention of protecting women’s rights. Nor can these so-called institutions do anything, either."

Samira says years of talking about rights for women, and the proliferation of institutions dedicated to this aim, have resulted in very little.

"For the whole of a decade, the so-called women’s rights defence institutions have pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars, particularly the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. Women’s rights have become lucrative,” she said, “Yet rights for women have not been assured, and the violence has gone up rather than down. All these conferences and slogans are purely symbolic. Everyone has started up an NGO in the name of women and is making money."

One of the arguments often made in the campaign against violence is that many Afghans mistakenly conflate local ultra-conservative traditions with Islam.

Daiulhaq, the deputy minister for the Hajj and religious affairs, says his institution is working hard to dispel such perceptions, with new departments focusing on gender issues and on Islamic teachings on women’s rights. In addition, he said, mosque prayer leaders were being asked to devote part of their weekly sermons to women’s rights and the evils of violence against them.

Despite this, Parwin Rahimi, head of the AIHRC’s women’s rights support and development department, accuses the religious affairs ministry of shirking its responsibilities.

“I am sure religious scholars do not ignore the truth, but certain people whose own interests could be at risk are blocking cooperation," she said.

Specifically, she said, the ministry had raised objections to the law on eradicating violence against women on the grounds that it conflicted with Islamic precepts.

Keramatullah Sediqi, director of Islamic research at the ministry, said the anti-violence legislation had deficiencies that needed to be addressed, such as the penalties which courts could impose, and the need for the law to set out “penalties if a woman commits violence against men".

Source

Hope you all had a blessed Eid-ul-Azha!

Eid namaz at mosque in Kabul

11-year-old girl married to 40-year-old man

Before their wedding ceremony begins in rural Afghanistan, a 40-year-old man sits to be photographed with his 11-year-old bride. The girl tells the photographer that she is sad to be engaged because she had hoped to become a teacher. Her favorite class was Dari, the local language, before she had to leave her studies to get married.

She is one of the 51 million child brides around the world today. And it's not just Muslims; it happens across many cultures and regions.

Photographer Stephanie Sinclair has traveled the world taking pictures, like the one of the Afghan couple, to document the phenomenon. Christiane Amanpour spoke with Sinclair about a book which features her photographs called, "Questions without Answers: The World in Pictures by the Photographers of VII."

Amanpour asked Sinclair if the 11-year-old Afghan girl married in 2005, and others like her, consummate their marriages at such an early age. Sinclair says while many Afghans told her the men would wait until puberty, women pulled her aside to tell her that indeed the men do have sex with the prepubescent brides.

Sinclair has been working on the project for nearly a decade. She goes into the areas with help from people in these communities who want the practice to stop, because they see the harmful repercussions.

In Yemen, a similar picture. Tehani and Ghada are sisters-in-law photographed with their husbands, who are both members of the military. Like most of the girls, Tehani didn’t even know she was getting married, until the wedding night. She was six years old.

Tehani describes how she entered the marriage, “They were decorating my hands, but I didn’t know they were going to marry me off. Then my mother came in and said, ‘Come on my daughter.’ They were dressing me up and I was asking, ‘Where are you taking me?’”

Sinclair says, “This harmful, traditional practice of child marriage is just so embedded in some of these cultures that the families don't protect them as they should.”

The subjects do know they’re being photographed and Sinclair tells them the topic she is working on. She does tell them that there is teen pregnancy in places like the U.S., but for the societies she’s photographing it’s even worse that 13-year-old girls are pregnant and unmarried.

Another one of the photographs Sinclair took is of a Yemeni girl named Nujood Ali. In a rare turn of events, Ali managed to get a divorce at age 10.

“A couple months after she was married, she went to the court and found a lawyer – a woman named Shada Nasser and asked her to help her get a divorce, and she was granted [it],” Sinclair says. “It's definitely rare and Nujood became kind of an international symbol of child marriage, because she was able to do this. And I think she's inspired a lot of other girls and other organizations to support these girls, to have a stronger voice.”

Sinclair has documented the practice outside of the Muslim world. In a Christian community in Ethiopia, she captured the image of a 14 year-old girl named Leyualem in a scene that looks like an abduction. Leyualem was whisked away on a mule with a sheet covering up her face. Sinclair asked the groomsmen why they covered her up; they said it was so she would not be able to find her way back home, if she wanted to escape the marriage.

Sinclair travelled to India and Nepal, and photographed child marriages among some Hindus.

A five-year-old Hindu girl named Rajni was married under cover of night: “Literally at four o'clock in the morning. And her two older sisters were married to two other boys,” Sinclair says. “Often you see these group marriages because the girl and the families can't afford to have three weddings.” In the five-year-old girl’s case, Rajni will continue to live with her own family for several years.

Girls aren’t always the only ones forced into marriage. Sinclair wanted to photograph child marries in India and Nepal, because sometimes the boys entering a marriage are also young. “And often they're victims just as much of this harmful traditional practice,” she says.

Sinclair told Amanpour that she hopes her photographs would not only highlight the problems to westerners, but also show people in the areas where this takes place that  if the girls continue to be taken out of the population to forcibly work at home, that their communities suffer as a whole.

“It's a harmful traditional practice that is slowly changing. We just want to have it change even faster.”

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Afghan teen murder spotlights growing violence against women

Pressing her cheek against the fresh grave of her newly married teenage daughter, Sabera yowls as she gently smears clumps of dirt over her tear-stained face.

"My daughter! Why did they kill you so brutally?" the mother screams in the sparsely filled cemetery in Parwan province, 65 km (40 miles) north of the Afghan capital, Kabul.

Sabera says her daughter Tamana was killed by a relative in a so-called "honour killing", in what officials link to a wider trend of rapidly growing violence against women in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan's independent human rights commission has recorded 52 murders of girls and women in the last four months, 42 of which were honour killings, compared to 20 murders for all of last year.

Activists and some lawmakers accuse President Hamid Karzai's government of selling out to the ultra-conservative Taliban, with whom it seeks peace talks, as most foreign troops prepare to leave the country by the end of 2014.

During their 1996-2001 reign, the Taliban banned women from education, voting and most work, and they were not allowed to leave their homes without permission and a male escort, rights which have been painstakingly won back.

But there are signs the government is backsliding on women's rights. Earlier this year, Karzai appeared to back recommendations from powerful clerics that stated women are worth less than men and can be beaten.

"Karzai has certainly changed, and women's issues are no longer a priority for him," said outspoken female lawmaker Fawzia Koofi.

Last week, Hanifa Safi, head of women's affairs in eastern Laghman province, became the first female official to be killed this year when a bomb planted on her car exploded.

A spokesman for Karzai said the government is committed to women's rights. "Unfortunate incidents against women do occur. The government is doing what it can," said Siamak Herawi.

FORCED MARRIAGE

Fifteen-year-old Tamana died not far from where a young woman was publicly executed for alleged adultery last month, touching off an international outcry.

Tamana's parents say she never returned from a trip to the local bakery in March, located near their home in Parwan's capital Charikar.

The next time they saw her was one week ago, lying dead on a hospital bed. A video filmed on their mobile phone last Monday at her funeral shows the teenager's bruised face swathed in white sheets.

"My daughter always said she wouldn't stop studying, and would one day become important, having to travel to work in a convoy of cars," Sabera told Reuters in her spartan living room, where flies buzzed over ruby red carpets.

"But now she is under a tonne of clay," she said, prompting her husband, retired intelligence official Abdul Fatah, to wipe a tear from his wrinkled eyes.

Tamana was forcibly married to her cousin after refusing his advances for months, they say, adding she was beaten and killed for being a "disobedient" wife, unable to hide unhappiness at her plight.

Reuters could not independently verify the family's claims, but police in Charikar said they believe Tamana was intentionally poisoned, although cannot say with certainty until the results of the autopsy come later this month.

No one has been arrested over Tamana's killing, but the alleged killer's sister was given as a bride to Tamana's brother as compensation, abiding by the brutal Afghan practice 'baad', which is widespread despite Karzai criminalising it in 2009.

She is one of eight women killed in Parwan since March including two in Bagram, home to a major U.S. base, who were shot to death. 

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