At 13, Shabano is as self-conscious and awkward as any teenaged girl. She laughs shyly when asked personal questions and nervously chips at the orange nail polish that can't hide her grimy nails.
But Shabano, like the other “women” prisoners in the Kandahar district jail, has adult-sized problems. Two months ago, she was jailed for running away from an arranged marriage with a 50-year-old man, a deal negotiated by her father before his death. Home for her now is a dark cell containing nothing but a filthy mattress folded up and stacked against the concrete wall.
Shabano has been locked up for breaking her father's deal, an exchange that horrified the girl who refers to her former fiancé simply as “the old man.”
“I don't want to spend my life with this old man,” she said, scrunching her nose in disgust. And then in a burst of anger, she launched into a diatribe against her country's ancient custom of arranging marriages for young girls.
“We don't have democracy in this country if someone wants a love marriage,” she said. “My father exchanged me for another girl.”When her father gave her to the 50-year-old man, he returned the gift by offering his own teenager to Shabano's father.
Shabano is one of the 16 adult female inmates at the Kandahar jail, which houses 750 prisoners, among them children and political prisoners. The women and their 18 children are housed in a separate compound. Their doorless rooms face an outdoor quadrant filled with dirt and weeds.
The children range in age from toddlers to a poised 10-year-old girl named Mash Kan, who arrived at the prison several months ago with her mother, who was accused of prostitution.
A common thread runs through most of the female inmates' stories: Most are behind bars for defying their husband or his family, to whom the wife is beholden after marriage.
Three of the imprisoned women killed their husbands. One, 16-year-old Azizah, strangled her husband's sister with a scarf three years ago.
“All the time she was beating me,” Azizah said, seated cross-legged on the floor of a cell, her two-year-old daughter on her lap. There is no regret or emotion on her round face. “She was a bad lady. My husband and his sister beat me all the time.”
While Azizah's crime of homicide is a serious one anywhere in the world, many of the other inmates' infractions can't be found in the criminal codes of most Western countries. Nor do these crimes of disobedience appear in Afghanistan's new constitution.
During the Taliban years, Afghanistan's prisons were notorious warehouses for men and women who disobeyed the regime's repressive rules, which included anything from a woman wearing the wrong colour of socks to laughing on the street.
That regime fell in 2001, but Afghanistan is still largely ruled by ancient customs which, among other things, govern the conduct and expectations of women and girls. The practice of trading young girls for marriage is more widespread among poor and uneducated families, where girls are used as a form of currency.
Azizah said she was married at age 12 to her older husband in a deal arranged by her father.
Recently, international human-rights groups have waded into this dicey legal territory, condemning the practice of jailing women for disobeying their husbands and families.
At the Kandahar prison, some of the women interviewed recently said they were jailed without a trial. None had a lawyer.
“Hundreds of women and girls are being held in prison across the country, the majority for violating social, behavioural and religious codes,” a 2003 Amnesty International report said. “Like men and children, they are being held for months in prisons across the country before having the legality of their detention determined.”
