Forced to Marry, Silenced by Fear: Afghan Girls in the Shadow of Farkhunda’s Deat

A timeline that cannot be ignored

• Early October 2025: Seventeen-year-old Farkhunda leaves her home in Takhar province for a marriage arranged between her family and the family of her groom.
• Mid-November 2025: She is found dead at or near her husband’s family home in Kabul’s Gulbahar Centre, just weeks into the marriage.
• Immediately afterwards: Taliban police state publicly that she died of a stroke, report “no suspicious individuals”, and say no formal complaint has been received.
• Relatives’ response: Family members, speaking to Afghan journalists, contest this account, describing the marriage as forced and the home environment as coercive and violent. They report that when they attempted to seek forensic examination, they were prevented from doing so.

These basic facts are uncontested: a teenage girl, newly married, is dead; the authorities insist on natural causes; her family raise serious concerns; and no independent forensic report has been published.

Competing accounts — and a justice system under strain

Reports from Afghan independent outlets state that relatives believed both bride and groom were pressured into the marriage by the groom’s wider family. They describe the environment she entered as “pressure” and “violence”. The account of rapid burial and blocked access to forensic examination comes directly from these family interviews.

None of these claims have been independently verified — an important fact, and one that reflects the reality of reporting under Taliban rule, where journalists and families face restrictions and fear of reprisal. That lack of verifiable access is itself part of the story.

What is clear is that transparency is absent. In any functioning system, a 17-year-old dying suddenly after a contested marriage would trigger an automatic and independent post-mortem. In Afghanistan today, that safeguard has collapsed.

A case that mirrors a national pattern

Farkhunda’s story resonates because it sits squarely inside a national picture that has been well documented by major agencies.

• UNICEF reports that just over one in four women in Afghanistan were married before the age of 18, even before the current crisis.
• Data collated by international child-protection organisations show provincial concentrations where early marriage affects almost half of all girls.
• Research published in 2024 found a sharp rise in child and forced marriages linked to the closure of girls’ schools, worsening poverty and fear that daughters could be targeted by armed groups.

These figures are not generalisations. They reflect consistent findings across independent humanitarian, academic and rights-based studies.

Education removed, vulnerability intensified

Afghanistan is now the only country where girls are barred from secondary and higher education nationwide. The consequences are documented by UN experts:

• girls lose the protection that schooling provides;
• families under pressure marry daughters earlier;
• without education, girls have no pathway to economic independence or legal understanding.

In this climate, marriage often becomes the default “solution” to insecurity, poverty and lack of opportunity.

Forced marriage as state-enabled harm

As someone who helped change the law on forced marriage in the UK, I recognise the patterns immediately: denial of autonomy, coercion disguised as protection, and the silencing of girls when they attempt to seek help.

“When girls are denied education and stripped of basic freedoms, forced marriage does not remain a private abuse. It becomes a predictable consequence of state policy. That makes it a form of state-enabled harm.”

“We criminalised forced marriage in the UK because we finally acknowledged the truth: this is not culture. This is child abuse, coercion and violence.”

Why Farkhunda’s death matters beyond one case

Critics may ask: How can one case speak for an entire system?
The answer lies not in speculation but in the documented environment in which this death occurred.

When:

• a girl dies suddenly;
• relatives say the marriage was imposed;
• the burial is accelerated;
• independent forensic examination does not take place;
• and the authorities insist there is nothing to investigate,

— then the issue is not only the cause of death. It is the absence of safeguards to reveal the truth.

What must happen now

There are steps that can be taken immediately without making assumptions about the cause of death:

1. A transparent, independent investigation into the circumstances surrounding Farkhunda’s death, with protection for relatives who seek answers.
2. International monitoring of child and forced marriage rates, with updated provincial data to identify regions where girls are most at risk.
3. Recognition by states and international bodies that the systematic exclusion of women and girls from education, justice and public life constitutes a form of structural gender oppression.
4. Support for Afghan women’s organisations that continue to document forced marriages and domestic violence despite severe restrictions.

The wider truth

A single case rarely changes a system. But Farkhunda’s death forces us to confront a truth that is now impossible to ignore: when you remove a girl’s right to education, limit her movements, and strip away legal and social protections, forced marriage becomes not an exception but an inevitability.

“A 17-year-old girl should be thinking about school and choices, not negotiating survival inside a marriage she did not choose. Her death is not just a tragedy — it is a warning that the world cannot continue to look away.” Aneeta Prem MBE

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