Afghan Women & Girls in a Very Baad Situation

[Redstate Bluegirl]

ASADABAD, Afghanistan — Shakila, 8 at the time, was drifting off to sleep when a group of men carrying AK-47s barged in through the door. She recalls that they complained, as they dragged her off into the darkness, about how their family had been dishonored and about how they had not been paid.

It turns out that Shakila, who was abducted along with her cousin as part of a traditional Afghan form of justice known as “baad,” was the payment.

Although baad (also known as baadi) is illegal under Afghan and, most religious scholars say, Islamic law, the taking of girls as payment for misdeeds committed by their elders still appears to be flourishing. Shakila, because one of her uncles had run away with the wife of a district strongman, was taken and held for about a year. It was the district leader, furious at the dishonor that had been done to him, who sent his men to abduct her.

Shakila’s case is unusual both because she managed to escape and because she and her family agreed to share their plight with an outsider. The reaction of the girl’s father to the abduction also illustrates the difficulty in trying to change such a deeply rooted cultural practice: he expressed fury that she was abducted because, he said, he had already promised her in marriage to someone else.

Link here http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/world/asia/in-baad-afghan-girls-are-penalized-for-elders-crimes.html?_r=1&hp#

Females as property, currency, chattel. It never ends!

[Warpy]

1. Just remember, women and girls fared just as ill in Europe and the American colonies

until quite recently. It was perfectly legal for husbands and fathers to sell women and girls for their labor and to settle his own debts. It didn't matter if a woman was born to aristocrats, she had nothing to say about who she'd get sold to in order to cement a family alliance and quite often, she was kidnapped as valuable property along with the furniture and gold plates.

Now we have religious patriarchs trying to reassert the ultimate power of the male in matters which exclusively affect women, the right to self determination in their own bodies.

It is no less evil than what is happening in Afghanistan and has exactly the same root cause, patriarchy.

Deny it or not, some very powerful men in the world want to reduce all women to breeding stock, with no more say in the conduct of their lives than cattle.

I have a great deal of sympathy for my Afghan sisters. However, we are fighting our own battle here and now and we must win it.

[renate]

2. three of my daughter's friends are from Afghanistan--I can see their faces as I read this article

Their families were wealthy enough to leave the country before the girls were born, so they have never known a culture in which this could happen--they're American-born and -raised. But I read this article and imagined these sweet, innocent, happy young girls in this situation--and try to absorb the fact that there are other girls, just as sweet and innocent, who are actually living this horror. It makes me unspeakably sad.