Jailed for adultery and murder, the child forced to marry at 12
The Times ^ | November 23, 2006 | Anthony Loyd
timesonline.co.uk
Sakina was sold by her father to a 65-year-old man, who was killed after one beating too many. Now his family say they want revenge
Engaged at 7, married at 12, jailed on a murder charge at 14, Sakina has never known justice and seldom been free. But at least she is safe in captivity. Beyond the walls of her detention centre many people want her dead. The eldest daughter of a poor Afghan farmer, she was sold into marriage by her father to a 65-year-old stranger for a $1,400 (£750) dowry, a deal designed to pay off debts.
“He was a very old man, without any teeth, and he was always cruel to me,” said Sakina, an alias. A striking, sharp-witted teenager wrapped in a coloured shawl, at first she displayed little evidence of trauma, though human rights officials and social workers say that most juvenile detainees in the country are scarred, both by their lives and subsequent experiences in the prison system.
“He was very jealous and never let me out of the house, not even to see my family,” Sakina added. “He used to beat me with a stick or cable, sometimes twice a day.” The beatings started on her wedding night when her husband thrashed his 12-year-old bride for her sexual ignorance.
One night there was a beating too many. Sakina woke to find the old man trying to throttle her with a rope. Her screams attracted her husband’s nephew, who burst into the room. There was a fight. The old man died of strangulation. Sakina and the nephew were jailed for murder. She was given an additional year for having an affair with the nephew, a charge she denies.
Sakina collapsed unconscious on the floor within seconds of finishing her story, her arms and legs thrashing in a fit. There was no medical aid, other than that given by two other teenage girl prisoners, who burnt matches under her nose in an attempt to rouse her. After a minute or so Sakina apparently recovered, sprang to her feet and sprinted away giggling.
“Sometimes after her fits she laughs, sometimes she runs around crying hysterically,” said Fazel Rahim, programme manager for War Child, the British-based humanitarian organisation working with child detainees in Herat. “We have had her examined by doctors from a foreign non-governmental organisation who say she needs urgent psychological help . . . none has been given so far.”
Sakina and her fellow inmates, male and female, are merely the tiny visible minority among Afghanistan’s many hidden victims of child abuse. Years of conservatism, ignorance, war and extreme poverty have exposed a generation of children to violence and hardship at home. Underage marriage remains common; child labour so endemic as to be almost unremarkable; beatings and sexual abuse a large, widespread secret.
As a result many children turn to crime, a broad-based definition including moral offences, theft, drug smuggling and murder. By the standards of those who are incarcerated, Sakina could almost be considered lucky. Herat’s young offenders serve their sentences in relatively advantaged conditions compared with those in other areas of Afghanistan. Segregated from adult prisoners in their own detention centre, they receive limited education and vocational training, funded by War Child.
However, War Child’s work may not be enough to save Sakina. And even a short visit to Herat’s youth detention centre reveals that the rights of juvenile prisoners in Afghanistan remain steamrollered by government ineptitude, lack of funds and fierce social prejudice. The match between their crimes and sentences seems entirely arbitrary. The offical judicial process is shunned by most Afghan communities, which rely on internal mechanisms for punishment, usually involving compensation.
Children who do end up in court tend to be from the cities, where the sway of tribal elders is weak, or else from areas where divided tribes cannot reach agreement on their punishment.
Most jailed girls are convicted for “moral crimes”. Of the three other girls in the detention yard with Sakina, two had been jailed for having affairs. One had been raped as a 12-year-old, the start of two years of abuse by a man in his sixties. Sentenced to three years for this crime, by the time she arrived in jail she was pregnant. Two months ago the child was born. Her family refused to look after the infant and forced her to have it adopted. She sat in the shadows staring at the sky.
Local officials given the task of protecting these girls’ rights sometimes appear as prejudiced as the communities from which the girls come. Asked about the case of the raped girl, Azam Akid, head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission’s juvenile section in Herat, which is charged with monitoring children’s rights in jail, said: “We have a phrase — the thread seldom passes through the eye of the needle without a connection first. In our society rape seldom happens without consent.”
The 32 boys held in a separate building of the city’s detention centre had a different set of problems. Sent down for theft, many were the breadwinners of poor families. Their sentences varied hugely. One United Nations human rights officer said that she knew of a case of a boy sentenced to a year for stealing a chicken.
Despite recent legal reforms designed to overhaul the sentencing procedure, it remains common for boys to spend weeks or months in jail before their cases even come to court. Such a backlog of paperwork exists that even once they have completed their sentence it may take several more months before the system locates their files and releases them. And though the age of criminal consent was recently raised from 7 to 13, a padlocked room at the side of their dormitory was designated for 11 and 12-year-olds who had slipped through the net. The lock was intended to save them from rape. Sexual abuse, both by guards and inmates, is rife, and prisoners say that beatings by prison staff are common. One 17-year-old, jailed for stealing $50, said that he could not walk for two days after guards tied his ankles across a pole and took turns beating the soles of his feet with cables. They had caught him taking snuff.
Top dog on the block was “Sattar”, another 17-year-old boy doing a 15-year sentence for stabbing a 42-year-old male relative to death, a crime he readily admitted. Sattar looked a tough individual, hard-faced and muscular, a gold watch and large green ring on his left hand designating his status. But even his sentence bore the suggestion of rough justice.
“The man lured me into a garden and tried to abuse me,” Sattar said. “We fought and I stabbed him. They gave me 15 years. My family know I’m telling the truth and are supporting me. Now they are selling off land to pay the judges and prosecutors. If you know the right people and pay the right people then you are released.”
Family support seldom exists for the jailed girls though. Moral crimes carry such stigma that upon release some young women are either killed or encouraged by relatives to self-immolate to save their family’s honour. The shame of having a daughter who has become pregnant outside marriage or run away from her husband, let alone killed him, reduces the dowry price of a family’s other daughters.
Sakina’s fate has been made worse by threats from her dead husband’s family to kill her the day she is released. “Her life is in danger the moment she is free,” Mr Rahim, of War Child, said. “The relatives of her dead husband still bear her animosity. No one will marry her. People will call her a prostitute. Some may try to take revenge. We know from these girls that they see only two alternatives when free — escape or suicide. Whatever the case, they will have a very bad time of it at home.” |
