Girls in Afghanistan are being sold; why did the BBC focus on the pain of the fathers doing the selling?

In news, framing can be everything. A BBC report showed the grotesque results of moral relativism.

Previously: Baron Blackwater’s Very Bad Book Club

Content warning: This edition discusses the abuse of children and the realities of ‘child marriage’.

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I first heard the report on Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday. The BBC’s South Asia and Afghanistan correspondent, Yogita Limaye, was speaking to men in Afghanistan who say they have been forced to sell their daughters to provide for the rest of their families. The angle was about the pain of those men rather than the grim fate of the girls they are selling. We heard a man weeping and were told that this was very uncommon in Afghanistan, where men are stoic.

We were supposed to give the bulk of our sympathy to men who were selling their daughters to be married while still pre-pubescent, sold into a life of rape and domestic servitude. The reality of what is happening, despite a warning in the text version of the report that it “contains distressing details”, was wrapped in euphemisms and caveats. The way this story was told stretched to understand the men and erase the girls.

After beginning with a scene in a marketplace where men gather to compete for a chance to get a day’s work labouring — according to the United Nations, three in four people cannot meet their basic needs — the story shifts to a man who says he is “willing to sell my daughters”. He brings out his seven-year-old twins and shows them to the reporter. He tells her, “If I sell one daughter, I could feed the rest of my children for at least four years.”

At this point, the report explains:

The choice to sell daughters over sons, is because culturally sons are widely seen as future breadwinners, and here in Afghanistan, with the Taliban’s restrictions on education and work for women and girls, it is even more pronounced.

This detail was only added after the story was first published, as an update placed at the bottom of the piece explains:

Update: This article has been amended to explain why daughters are more often sold than sons in Afghanistan.

The original headline on the piece read Selling children to survive: Afghan fathers forced to make impossible choices. It’s not simply children who are being sold — as horrendous as that would be — it is girls. It’s a crucial detail.

While the first man featured has not yet sold any of his children, a second case study involves a man who has sold his five-year-old daughter to a relative. He tells Limaye that she had to have surgery to deal with appendicitis and a cyst in her liver, and that he sold her to pay for the treatment. When she is 10, she will be sent away to be married to one of her relative’s sons.

The report quotes the man saying:

Giving away your child at such a young age, carries a lot of anxiety. Underage [marriages] have their problems; however, because I couldn’t pay for her treatment, I was thinking, at least she will be alive.

That phrase “underage marriage” is repeated in the report, but those “problems” that the man refers to are not detailed explicitly. The story simply says:

The practice of underage marriage remains widespread in Afghanistan and is increasing due to the Taliban government’s bar on education for girls.

The report focuses on the “weary faces” of the fathers, their “parched lips”, and how “distressed and confused” they feel. The suffering of the girls, the description of how they look, and how they feel is absent. The physical and psychological destruction they face is treated as a side issue to the pain of their fathers.

At the same time, the girls are named in the story and pictured. If this were a story about children in the UK, there is no way that they would be identified like that. The right to dignity and the protection for children shouldn’t end at the border. The BBC has extensive guidelines on identifying children in coverage. They don’t seem to apply when it comes to those girls in Afghanistan.

It is eminently possible to report this story without the focus on the fathers and being entirely direct about the reality for the girls who are the victims of it. In January 2024, Stephanie Sinclair, who campaigns to end child marriage, reported on the issue for The Washington Post. Her story begins:

Their names are Khoshbakht, Saliha, Fawzia, Benazir, Farzana and Nazia — Afghan girls ages 8 to 10 who have been sold into marriage. Desperation forced their parents to thrust them into brutal adulthood.

From the start, Sinclair centres the girls and does not soften the reality. Rather than lean on euphemisms like “underage marriage” and gross understatements that it is a “problem”, she unpacks exactly what is happening:

Sequestered at home, a girl becomes just another mouth to feed. But as a bride, she’s a valuable commodity. A $2,000 bride price is enough to feed a family for a year. For the girls, of course, this is a nightmare. In their new in-laws’ homes, they are saddled with housework and often subject to verbal, physical and sexual abuse — slavery under the guise of matrimony. It’s no wonder suicide and depression are rising among Afghan teenage girls.

Her report tells the girls’ stories and includes their voices. They are not treated as a cause of sadness for their fathers — the men who have sold them — but as people in their own right, victims of a system that exploits them, and an international community that has failed them.

It would not be a breach of the BBC’s impartiality to state clearly that there is no excuse for selling a human being, for bartering a girl’s life. It’s not a failure of empathy to say that “underage marriage” is wrong no matter what. Saying “There is a tradition [in Afghanistan] in which a marital gift is given to the family of the girl from the family of the boy during marriage” as the BBC report does so breezily is grotesque.

The BBC should absolutely be telling the stories of what is happening in Afghanistan, but the way it told this one failed the girls that should have been at its heart. It asked us to feel greater sorrow for the men doing the selling than the girls being sold.

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