“Iwas sold twice,” Samira told me one day in May 2010. A shy seventeen-year-old girl, she was “under protection” in a juvenile correction center in Kunduz province, in the northeast of Afghanistan. When Samira was two years old, her father engaged her to a boy whom she was forced to marry when she was thirteen. Her husband regularly beat her, blaming her for the huge debt caused by the high bride price he had to pay to her family. One day, her husband took her to a district in a neighboring province, where a friend of his was waiting in a car alongside the road. Her husband handed Samira to his friend. The man, living in a village that Samira was not familiar with, took her home and raped her, saying he bought her as a wife, allowing her first husband to pay off his debt. Only fifteen at the time, Samira had been sold a second time by a male family member.

A few months later, Samira ran away from home and took a bus to Kunduz city. As she was walking alone, a police officer arrested her, accusing her of “running away” with the intention to commit zina (sexual intercourse outside of marriage, a crime under Islamic law). The police did not look for her original husband or the man who bought her. The court convicted her of zina and put her in jail. After one and half years in prison, Samira was released and her first husband took her back to his house. Later, Samira ran away from home again to escape abuse at the hands of her husband and his family. She fled to a juvenile correction center, asking for protection as there was no safe house or protection center for women in northeastern Afghanistan. Samira was now “sheltered” in the juvenile correction center while local NGOs were looking for a solution other than returning her to her abusive husband or back to jail.

Harmful traditional practices like child marriage, forced marriage, exchange marriage (mutual arrangements between families to exchange daughters, known as baadal), “giving away” girls as a means to resolve disputes (known as baad), selling girls, subjecting them to forced isolation in the home, and “honor” killings—cause suffering, humiliation, and marginalization, if not death, for millions of women and girls in Afghanistan.