Unreported World

7 November 2013

1/8: Afghanistan's Hunted Women, 04/10/13, 7:30pm, Channel 4

In the first episode of a new series of award-winning Unreported World, reporter Krishnan Guru-Murthy and director Wael Dabbous travel to Afghanistan, gaining rare access to the secret houses that shelter women hiding from violent husbands or from families who have tried to kill them for refusing to take part in arranged marriages.

Improving women’s rights was supposed to be one of the great legacies of Britain’s involvement in Afghanistan, but Unreported World reveals that, as international forces start to pull out, powerful religious hardliners are trying to roll back new laws that protect women.

Guru-Murthy talks to 22-year-old Zarghona, whose family tried to marry her off to a man in his forties. She tells Unreported World what happened when she refused. ‘They led me into an orchard. My father checked that nobody was around then he took out a knife. He stabbed me three times in my back, twice in the sides and twice in the stomach. He stabbed me 16 times in total. Then my father slashed my throat. They covered me with a sheet and placed a stone at each corner and left me to die.’

The team also meet 15-year-old Sahar Gul, who was sold into an arranged marriage at the age of 12 and terribly abused. When she was rescued two years later, she was barely alive.

Her fingernails had been removed; her flesh had been pulled with pliers and her hair torn out. Television pictures of her horrific injuries made international headlines and she became a focus for international campaigners. 

In a rare case of justice for a victim of this type of crime, members of her husband’s family were jailed for ten years for torturing her. However, in an illustration of the injustice she and similar victims can face, once the glare of international publicity died down, her in-laws were freed, having served just 18 months of their sentences.

She is now working with a lawyer trying to get them sent back to jail but in the meantime tells Guru-Murthy that she’s living in daily fear: ‘I’m scared that if I go outside they will kidnap me again and take me back to that horrible place.’

Traditionally, women fleeing violent husbands have been falsely accused of adultery and jailed, and many still are. Women’s shelters became legal in Afghanistan following the passing of a new law to tackle violence against women, but religious conservatives are now trying to overturn the law and close the shelters down.

Qazi Hanafi is a hardline MP in the Afghan parliament. He spearheaded the opposition to the laws to protect women from violence. He tells Guru-Murthy: ‘All of the bad people who want to sin end up in those places. They are considered places of ill-repute. A woman should only have one husband. Otherwise we will suffer the scourge of Aids, which is destroying the West.’

He seems unprepared to listen to those campaigning for women’s rights: ‘To those women who say that I am taking them back to the Dark Ages, I say there is no doubt that you are infidels and worse still you are corrupting others. We will fight you like we fought the Russians.’

Reporter: Krishan Guru-Murthy; Dir: Wael Dabbous; Series Editor: Suzanne Lavery; Prod Co: Quicksilver Media