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The Taliban’s Legalization of Child Sexual Exploitation

  • Belquis Ahmadi

Over the past several days, I have spoken with women across several provinces in Afghanistan to understand how their lives are being reshaped by the Taliban’s latest decrees, particularly Decree No. 12 on Criminal Court Procedure and Decree No. 18 on the Judicial Separation of Spouses. Decree No.12, signed by the Taliban’s leader in January this year, establishes a deeply repressive criminal justice framework that, among other things, dismantles fundamental legal protections and legitimizes systematic discrimination. It denies the rights to a fair trial, due process, judicial independence, and meaningful appeal, codifies unequal treatment before the law based on social status, reinforces male control over women within marriage, permits violence against women and the physical punishment of children, and appears to empower private individuals to surveil and punish others.  

Decree No.18, published on May 14, 2026, codifies the Taliban’s rules governing judicial separation of spouses, severely restricting women and girls’ ability to leave forced marriages. It enforces male control over marital decisions, legitimizes child and forced marriages by recognizing marriages arranged during childhood, allows fathers and grandfathers to arrange marriages for minors, and treats a girl’s silence after puberty as consent. It imposes significant legal barriers on women and girls seeking to challenge or dissolve a marriage.  

These decrees deepen the institutionalized subordination of women and girls. They expand the Taliban’s control over their bodies, their access to justice, and virtually every aspect of their daily lives.

In my conversations with women across Afghanistan, one issue kept coming up about  the growing number of girls being forced into so-called “child marriages.” Yet every time I write those words, I question whether they belong together. Marriage is a voluntary union between two consenting adults who freely choose to build a life together. A child possesses neither the legal capacity nor the emotional maturity to give meaningful consent. Calling these unions “marriages” risks sanitizing what they truly are: the rape, coercion, and sexual exploitation of children.

The Taliban’s Exploitation of Poverty and Fear 

Women from southern and eastern Afghanistan told me that Taliban officials are increasingly exploiting families’ desperate poverty by offering money and promises of government jobs in exchange for their young daughters becoming second, third, or fourth wives of Taliban members. According to the women I spoke with, for families struggling to feed their children, these offers can appear to be the only means of survival, even as they condemn their daughters to lives of coercion, abuse, and exploitation.

In the north and the central highlands, I heard a different kind of desperation. Women told me that many families are voluntarily arranging early marriages for their daughters as a form of protection. They marry them to cousins, relatives, or young men from their own communities, believing that an early marriage to someone they know is preferable to the risk of their daughters being forced into marriage by Taliban members. It is a tragic choice in which parents sacrifice one injustice in the hope of preventing another. 

The stories I heard reveal a system under Taliban rule in which girls are no longer treated as children with rights, aspirations, and futures, but as commodities to be exchanged, controlled, and exploited. For Afghan girls, childhood is a luxury they are not allowed to have.

This is not culture, it is not tradition, and it is certainly not marriage. It is the commodification of children.

Calling it Marriage Does Not Make it Lawful 

A child cannot consent to marriage or to sexual relations. International human rights law is clear. Article 16(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 23(3) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights provide that marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses. A child cannot give free and full consent.

What is occurring in Afghanistan is therefore not marriage in any meaningful legal or moral sense, but the coercion and sexual exploitation of children under the guise of marriage. The forced exploitation of girls is only one component of a much broader system that has systematically robbed Afghan women and girls of nearly every fundamental right. The Taliban’s policies toward women constitute one of the most comprehensive systems of gender-based oppression anywhere in the world today.

Little girls are forced into submission under the guise of marriage when they should be in school, playing with dolls, running through fields, dreaming about becoming doctors, teachers, engineers, or artists. Instead, they are being handed over to men old enough to be their fathers or grandfathers.

This is not religion. This is not family. This is institutionalized child sexual abuse.

Many legal scholars, human rights experts, and Afghan women have described this system as gender apartheid—the institutionalized domination of one gender over another through law, policy, and coercion. At the same time, these acts form part of what international law already recognizes as gender persecution, a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

 The Accountability Gap

As part of my conversations, I learned about a young girl from Badghis who was forced by the Taliban into marriage with a man more than twice her age. My first thought was: the man who married her, the mullah who officiated the marriage, and everyone who facilitated it should be held accountable.

But almost immediately, another question followed. Accountable where?  Before whom?

When the authorities themselves enforce a legal system built upon the oppression of women and girls and reduce them to commodities, where can a child seek justice?

The international community is not helping these children, either. The very governments that spent decades describing themselves as allies of the Afghan people—and whose leaders repeatedly proclaimed their commitment to democracy, human rights, and the rights of Afghan women—are now engaging with the very movement they once fought. They now receive Taliban delegations, negotiate agreements with them, and pursue forms of engagement that many Afghans perceive as conferring political legitimacy on a regime that continues to deprive half the population of their most fundamental rights.

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and Muslim-majority countries have remained largely silent as well, despite the fact that marriage without free and full consent, and the systematic subjugation of women and girls, are incompatible not only with international human rights law but also with the core Islamic values of justice, human dignity, compassion, and the protection of the vulnerable. However, nearly five years after the Taliban seized power, expressions of concern continue to outnumber concrete measures. What is perhaps most striking is how rarely the OIC has meaningfully engaged Afghan women themselves—the women-led organizations, scholars, activists, and civil society leaders who have documented these abuses from the very beginning and continue to bear their consequences every day. 

This left me with one remaining hope: the International Criminal Court. For many Afghan victims, it represents the only independent institution capable of delivering justice where none exists inside Afghanistan. The Court has already recognized gender persecution as a crime against humanity and has sought arrest warrants for two senior Taliban leaders for the systematic persecution of women and girls. Yet for many victims, justice continues to move painfully slowly. Years have passed since the International Criminal Court opened its investigation into crimes committed in Afghanistan, yet evidence has continued to accumulate, and new abuses are reported almost daily.

Every new decree, every disappeared woman, every forced marriage, and every woman flogged raises the same painful question. How long must Afghan women and girls wait before justice becomes more than a promise?

Justice Requires More than Words 

The world has developed conventions, treaties, courts, and institutions precisely to prevent atrocities like these. If they cannot protect a child from being sold into marriage and raped under the protection of state policy, then we must ask ourselves what those promises truly mean.

For Afghanistan’s women and girls, sympathy without accountability offers no protection.

Where are the targeted financial sanctions against Taliban leaders responsible for these policies?

Where are the freezes on overseas assets, bank accounts, and properties?

Where are the travel restrictions, diplomatic consequences, and clear conditions making any political engagement contingent upon restoring the fundamental rights of Afghan women and girls?

How can meaningful solutions emerge while those most affected remain excluded from the conversation?

As Afghan women continue to be erased from public life, the international community is expanding diplomatic engagement with the Taliban, risking the normalization of policies that enable grave abuses against women and girls. The stories that reach the outside world of girls coerced into sexual exploitation under the guise of marriage or who vanish without explanation represent only a small fraction of the reality. 

Countless others will remain hidden behind the walls of their homes. Their suffering will be known only to their families, if at all. Most will disappear into silence, their abuse never documented, their cases never investigated, and their lives never acknowledged. They will become invisible victims of a system that has transformed exploitation into law and impunity into state policy.  

Unless the international community places the protection of Afghan girls at the center of its engagement with the Taliban, many more children will disappear into systems of child sexual exploitation carried out under the guise of marriage. Deprived of free and informed consent and denied any realistic means of escape, their lives will remain absent from official records, their voices unheard, and their future irrevocably stolen. 

Belquis Ahmadi is a human rights lawyer, researcher, women’s rights advocate, and an independent consultant who has authored numerous policy and analytical works on women’s rights, women, peace and security, extremism, and justice.

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