The Taliban Legalizes Child Marriage—The USA Won't Ban It

SubscribeSign in

The Taliban Legalizes Child Marriage—The USA Won't Ban It<br>The World Must Respond, And America Must Look in the Mirror

Qasim Rashid, Esq.<br>May 26, 2026

370

45<br>149

Share

The Taliban is committing yet another atrocity upon Afghan girls. A human rights catastrophe and a violation of international law. And it has absolutely no basis in Islamic teaching—despite the Taliban’s cynical and dishonest invocation of religion.<br>But this story is bigger than Afghanistan. It is a story about the global failure to protect girls from child marriage—including right here in the United States. And it is a story about the consequences of twenty years of American imperial warfare that left women and girls in Afghanistan worse off than before a single bomb was dropped.<br>In this article I analyze the horrors that the Taliban is inflicting upon women and girls, the United States’ complicity in this atrocity, and what meaningful legal levers we have to fight back and protect women and girls in Afghanistan and globally.<br>Let’s Address This.<br>Let’s Address This is an independent platform dedicated to human rights, social justice, and the facts that corporate media ignores. Join our movement for justice and subscribe.

Subscribe

Zareena, left, and Shakeela, internally displaced Afghan girls play at a refugee camp in Kabul, Afghanistan. Dar Yasin/AP<br>What the Taliban Just Did—And Why It Is So Dangerous

This month Afghanistan’s Taliban government published Decree No. 18—a new law on judicial separation in marriage. The United Nations expressed “grave concern” about the decree, saying the code further entrenches discrimination against women and girls. The law’s most devastating provisions target girls directly. Among its most controversial provisions, it says that the silence of a girl reaching puberty can be interpreted as consent to marriage. It also includes a section on the separation of girls who reach puberty and are married, which “implies that child marriage is permitted,” the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said in a statement.<br>And escape from that trap has been made nearly impossible. If a girl asks her husband for a divorce and he denies it, “then in this case, there are no witnesses with the girl, the husband’s word is valid,” the new law says. As Human Rights Watch Afghanistan researcher Fereshta Abbasi asked devastatingly: “How could a girl who has been married to an abusive husband for four, five years dare to go to court?”<br>Additionally, a husband’s absence or failure to provide financial support is no longer considered sufficient grounds for divorce. The legislation has triggered protests in the capital, Kabul. Women’s rights organizations have described the law as “institutionalized violence” against women and children. The Taliban already commits gender apartheid in their restrictions on women’s right to work and movement—and now further financial apartheid by absolving the men controlling every aspect of their lives from providing financial support.<br>The scale of the crisis this law will deepen is staggering. According to the Guardian’s reporting, there are no official statistics on forced and underage marriages in Afghanistan, but activists say the rate has risen at an alarming pace in recent years, driven by the Taliban’s ban on girls receiving education after the age of 11. One informal estimate cited by The Guardian suggests that since that ban, approximately 70% of girls have been pushed into early or forced marriage—and that 66% of those marriages involved girls under the age of 18.<br>“Decree No. 18 is part of a broader and deeply concerning trajectory in which the rights of Afghan women and girls are being eroded,” said Georgette Gagnon, the UN official overseeing the mission in Afghanistan.<br>The Taliban’s response? They claimed the decree follows Islamic law. That claim is not just wrong. It is an insult to Islam itself.

Women protesting against child marriage in Kabul. Photograph: Rukhshana Media<br>This Is Not Islam—It Is a Perversion of It

Violent and insecure men have long used religion as an excuse to abuse women when in reality they mean patriarchy and their own egos. The Taliban invokes Islam to justify virtually every atrocity it commits against women and girls. This must be named and refuted directly—because the conflation of Taliban ideology with Islamic teaching is false and devastating to the women and girls harmed by their twisted logic.<br>The Quran is explicit. Surah An-Nisa, verse 20 condemns any force or coercion in matters relating to women, declaring in explicit terms:<br>O ye who believe. It is not lawful for you to inherit women against their will; nor should you detain them wrongfully… and consort with women in kindness…

No deep interpretation needed. In simple terms. It is unlawful to deny women their free will and autonomy. The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) established—fourteen centuries ago—that...