According to CNN, a 16 year old Afghan woman was forced to marry her cousin’s husband who raped her to avoid the consequences of going to jail for ‘forced adultery’ and suffering the shame of social ostracization and her family’s rejection.
Though pardoned by the President of Afghanistan for been raped, the woman related to CNN that she had no choice giving birth to the rapist’s daughter as she would have had to suffer the dire consequences of social condemnation in a deeply conservative society where women have no rights and are blamed for the ills in the society. A conservative society like Afghanistan always blame the rape victim and rarely blame the rapist for perpetrating the crime.
Gulnaz’s brothers insisted she would not be allowed to return to her ‘shamed’ family as she was unmarried and a Kabul court sentenced her to two years in prison for ‘adultery by force.’ The only hope of a reduced sentence was to marry Asadullah, which she did in early 2013. Now she is pregnant with his third child but insists she only agreed to marry her rapist so that her first daughter – named Smile – could live a shame-free life in the Afghan capital’s ‘traditional’ society.
“Unfortunately, Gulnaz was heavily pressured to marry her attacker by various people within the government which, in and of itself, was immensely disappointing,” her former attorney, an American citizen named Kimberley Motley, tells us.
“Gulnaz was constantly told that neither she nor her daughter would be protected if she did not succumb to their pressure to marry… Gulnaz essentially became a prisoner of her environment.
“As an uneducated, young, single mother with no family support, it would have been an uphill battle for Gulnaz and her daughter
Just over two years after Gulnaz married Asadullah the rapist’s husband and husband to her cousin, the couple agreed to a joint interview with CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh.
