Women's Rights in Afghanistan - Marriage and Parenting

Marriage and Parenting

Afghanistan is a patriarchal society where it is commonly believed that men are entitled to make decisions for women, include those pertaining to engagement and marriage. A man can divorce without needing his wife's agreement.

Arranged marriages are common for women in Afghanistan and they are done mostly for political and economic reasons. A girl's father has the ultimate authority over who he believes his daughter should marry. It is not uncommon for girls to be engaged even before they are born. Girls are often married off at a very young age to wealthy men who are much older than themselves. Reports have even indicated that in the most poverty-stricken areas of rural Afghanistan, families have been reduced to selling their daughters to much older men in exchange for food.

After a marriage is arranged, the two families sign an engagement contract that both parties are socially and culturally obligated to honor. After this contract is signed, the bride is forbidden to marry another man. If the bride dies before the marriage, her family is required to give her sister as a bride or find another desirable replacement.

It is common among low-income families in most areas of the country for the groom to pay a bride price to the bride's family. The price is negotiated among the heads of the family; the bride herself is not included in the negotiation process. The bride price is viewed as compensation for the money that the bride's family has had to spend on her care and upbringing. There have been many instances where a family is so stricken by poverty that a father will betroth his daughters to multiple men and collect the bride price from each of them. The resulting disputes, although addressed by the courts, often lead to violent reprisals. Girls are sometimes also bartered in a traditional method of dispute resolution called baad that proponents say helps avoid violence between families, although the girls themselves are often subject to considerable violence both before and after marrying into a family through baad.

In many cases, once a girl is married she becomes the property of her new family and continues to have little to no control over her situation. In family matters, the girl's mother-in-law and her husband have the most control. In most cases, it is the mother-in-law, who decides whether or not her pregnant daughter-in-law should go to the hospital or not.

Under the Afghan law, "if a woman seeks a divorce then she has to have the approval of her husband and needs witnesses who can testify in court that the divorce is justified." The first occurrence of a woman divorcing a man in Afghanistan was the divorce initiated by Rora Asim Khan, who divorced her husband in 1927. This was described as unique at the time it occurred, but this was an exception, as Rora Asim Khan was a foreign citizen, who obtained her divorce by assistance from the German embassy.

Read more about this topic:  Women's Rights In Afghanistan

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