New Delhi: UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore said on Saturday that there are reports that families in war-torn Afghanistan are offering daughters up to 20 days old for future marriages in exchange for a dowry. Fore said in a statement that even before the recent political instability, UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) allies reported 183 child marriages and 10 cases of child sales between 2018 and 2019 in Herat and Baghdis provinces alone in Afghanistan. The ages of these children ranged from six months to 17 years.
“I am deeply concerned about reports that child marriages are on the rise in Afghanistan,” he said. We have received credible reports that families have offered daughters up to 20 days of age for future marriage in return for dowry. Fore said that the situation has been made more serious by the Kovid-19 epidemic, the ongoing food crisis, and the onset of winter. He said that in 2020, nearly half of Afghanistan’s population was so poor that it lacked things like basic nutrition or clean water.
“The extremely dire economic situation in Afghanistan is pushing more families into poverty and forcing them to make desperate choices such as putting children to work and marrying off girls at an early age,” Fore said.
He said, since most teenage girls are still not allowed to go back to school, the risk of child marriage is now even greater. Education is often the best protection against negative mechanisms like child marriage and child labor.
