Stephanie Sinclair, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, is the founder and president of Too Young To Wed.
Their names are Khoshbakht, Saliha, Fawzia, Benazir, Farzana and Nazia — Afghan girls ages 6 to 10 who have been sold into marriage. Desperation forced their parents to thrust them into brutal adulthood. In Shahrak-e-Sabz, a settlement of makeshift mud-brick homes and tents for the displaced in Herat province that we visited last month, our researchers counted 118 girls who had been sold as child brides, and 116 families with girls waiting for buyers. This amounts to 40 percent of families surveyed, even though the Taliban decreed in late 2021 that women should not be considered “property” and must consent to marriage.
