Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS

The pitiful plight of Afghan women could not be more obvious than in the case of a young Afghan woman who was raped and impregnated by her cousin’s husband, then forced to marry him in order to secure a better life for her child.

CNN is reporting on the story of a woman known only as Gulnaz, who was barely 16 when she was raped and impregnated by a family member named Asadullah. Because of the unconscionable treatment of women in this country, Gulnaz was thrown in jail for the crime of “adultery by force” because her rapist was a married man. He received no punishment for the crime.

However, the story was leaked to the international press which set off a firestorm of controversy that resulted in Gulnaz’s early release from prison by presidential decree.

One would think her story gets better from here, but it only gets worse.

Due to the cultural norms in Afghanistan, she was shunned and rejected by everyone, even her own family, and found herself suddenly unable to care for her infant daughter, named Smile.

Her only recourse was to do the unthinkable – marry her attacker.

When CNN reporter Nick Paton Walsh visited the home Gulnaz now shares with Asadullah and his first wife, he found her pregnant with their third child.

“If I hadn’t married her, (but) according to our traditions, she couldn’t have lived back in society,” Asadullah told Walsh. “Her brothers didn’t want to accept her back. Now, she doesn’t have any of those problems.”

In his mind, he had done the right thing by marrying her and rescuing her from the shame that he brought upon her in the first place.

Gulnaz then explains: “I didn’t want to ruin the life of my daughter or leave myself helpless so I agreed to marry him. We are traditional people. When we get a bad name, we prefer death to living with that name in society.”

While seven other children run around in the family courtyard, including little Smile, Walsh senses the order in the house, but finds it to be undermined “by the fact that this is a house built around a crime,” he writes.

Before visiting Gulnaz, he learned the hard facts of her case from her lawyer, Kimberley Motley, an American. Motley said activists were trying to gain asylum abroad Gulnaz but the government wanted her to stay put and marry her attacker.

“Unfortunately, Gulnaz was heavily pressured to marry her attacker by various people within the government which, in and of itself, was immensely disappointing,” Motley told Walsh.

“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.”

Eventually, Gulnaz agreed to marry Asadullah and is now saying that her own relatives put her up to the allegations of rape she made against him.

“Now she is beside me and knows that it was not as big as they had shown it,” Asadullah tells Walsh.

Gulnaz agrees and says, “I don’t have a problem with him now and I don’t want to think about the past problems. My life is OK… I am happy with my life… It is going on.”

It is not until Asadullah moves away that Gulnaz admits that her brothers in Pakistan actually opposed the marriage and wanted her to live with them instead. As a result of her decision, they have now disowned her.

She maintains that it was all for the sake of her daughter, even though it means the end of the life she always hoped for herself.

“I couldn’t fulfill my wishes in life,” she told Walsh. “I married this man; I cut relations with my family only to buy my daughter’s future.”

The story is disturbing on many levels.

“It is truly chilling to see how things have gone for Gulnaz after the level of international attention her story received,” Walsh reports, “pregnant with the third child of the man who was once her rapist, accepting a life as his second wife, trapped in his home.”

In spite of the fact that the U.S. and other countries have poured millions into Afghanistan to try to improve the lot of women in that nation, Gulnaz’s story proves that this country still has a very long way to go before its population is able to appreciate the true value of the women in their midst.

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