Afghan culture of brutality toward women continues

Washington Post:

The room was carpeted and cozy, warm from the wood stove and filled with the chatter of children. But the tales their mothers and older sisters told recently, speaking hesitantly even in the safety of a guarded private shelter, were bone-chilling.

Sahara, an angelic-looking young woman, said she was forcibly married at 11, widowed at 12 and kept as a virtual slave by her in-laws for the next eight years. Unable to endure more beatings, she slipped away early one morning, walked for two days and nights and finally ventured into a police station to ask for help.

Gulshan, a mother of three with a permanently worried look, said she was falsely accused of murdering her husband after he had an affair with her sister. She was sentenced to five years in jail, and her husband's brothers vowed to kill her upon her release. Under the law, they may also take custody of her small children, who are hidden with her at the shelter.

"They said I killed my husband, but I am very sad he died, even though he had a bad friendship with my sister," Gulshan said. "I need him, because of the children. Now I am alone in life, and in this society a woman alone is less than nothing."

Until recently, most of the 20 women at the shelter would probably have been either dead or in prison, hunted down by male relatives seeking revenge or hit with criminal charges for actions that would not be illegal in the West, such as eloping with a boyfriend or fleeing an abusive husband. Some might have committed suicide by burning themselves, as hundreds of desperate Afghan girls and women have done in the past several years.

Afghan society still considers such women "bad" and deserving of punishment. According to the country's conservative Muslim and tribal traditions, arranged marriages are both a cultural cornerstone and a business contract, sometimes with two sisters marrying two brothers. Wives are expected to endure beatings, unfaithfulness or years of separation in obedient silence.

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Afghanistan is not the only Muslim culture of misogyny. Both Saudi Arabia and Pakistan treat women who have been raped as criminals unless the rapist are dumb enough to do it in front of four men who do not participate. Clerics have written books on how to beat your wife so that it does not show. Perhaps that is another reason why the Islamist want to keep them covered from head to toe. It is a cultural deficiency that the multi culties ignore. It also robs those cultures of the talents that women can bring to a marriage or a business.