I4yr old girl gets justice after use as sex slave by husband, in-laws

Sahar Gul

After paying the sum of $5,000 as bride price for 13yr old Sahar Gul, her husband, Ghulam Sakhi took her to his parents' home in Baghlan where he turned her into a sex slave. Initially, she was able to resist consummating the marriage for weeks. She ran away to the house of a neighbor, who alerted both the police and her husband's family. Ghulam Sakhi's neighbors and the police forced him to sign a letter promising not to mistreat Sahar Gul, though they let him take her back. One day, when she complained of a headache, her mother-in-law, Siyamoi, tricked her into taking a sedative that she thought was medicine, said Mushtari Daqiq, the acting executive director of the aid group Women for Afghan Women and also Sahar Gul's lawyer. "When she woke up in the morning, she realized she had been used by her husband," Ms. Daqiq said. Thereafter, Sahar Gul’s husband and in-laws began to torture her by hitting her with sticks, biting her chest, inserting hot irons in her ears and vagina, and pulling out two fingernails. "She was helpless," Ms. Daqiq said. "She had no hope for her life." They threw her into a dirty, windowless cellar for months until the police discovered her lying in hay and animal dung. Sahar Gul lost her father when she was 9, so she ended up with her stepbrother, Mohammad. She helped with the hard work - tending cows, sheep and an orchard of walnut and apricot trees, and making dung bricks for the fire - but her stepbrother's wife resented her presence. The woman pressured Mohammad to give Sahar Gul up for marriage after he was contacted by a man, about 30yr old Ghulam Sakhi - even though she had not yet reached the legal marriage age of 16, or 15 with a father's consent. In July, an appeals court upheld prison sentences of 10 years each for three of her in-laws, a decision heralded as a legal triumph underscoring the advances for women's rights in the past decade. She is recovering from her wounds, physical and emotional, in a women's shelter in Kabul. Sahar Gul, who is now about 14, grew up in Badakhshan, a poor, mountainous province in the north Culled from NDTV