The Taliban administration's recently issued divorce decree represents a formalized legal infrastructure for gender apartheid, systematically trapping girls as young as 12 in marriages they never chose and providing virtually no pathway to freedom.
The May 14 decree titled "On The Judicial Separation Of Spouses" formally acknowledges that child marriage is permitted under Taliban rule in Afghanistan. More insidiously, Article 5 establishes that girls can only dissolve marriages "upon reaching puberty"—and that silence after puberty is interpreted as consent to the marriage.
"I didn't even have my first period yet. I had no idea what marital life or sex was," said Neda, a pseudonym for a woman who was married at age 12 to a 20-year-old stranger in Darwaz district. Her divorce took two years through the Shari'a court system. She now lives as a refugee in Pakistan.
The decree theoretically allows girls to seek divorce if their husbands lack "kindness," but this provision is virtually meaningless in practice. The law requires witness testimony—and crucially, if witnesses cannot be produced, courts must accept the husband's account. In a society where women face severe restrictions on movement, education, and public life, producing independent witnesses becomes nearly impossible.
Another survivor, Sana, was forced into marriage at 13 after losing her parents. She obtained a divorce at 18 but faced devastating social stigma. She eventually remarried and lost her job when the Taliban returned to power in 2021, illustrating how the current regime's restrictions compound the vulnerabilities of women who have already survived forced child marriage.
The United Nations mission in Afghanistan condemned the decree as noting it implicitly permits child marriage despite Afghanistan's previous legal framework that set the marriage age at 16 for girls.
