Exchange marriages or the practice of two families giving their daughters in marriage to each other has meant suffering for the women and acrimony between families.
The practice is more widely prevalent in the eastern and south eastern provinces. There are exchange marriages in other parts of Afghanistan too.
A resident of Nangarhar province, Ruhullah has witnessed the violence perpetrated on women in exchange marriages and wants the practice to stop. He related the experience of such a marriage in the family of a relative, where when relations between the two families soured, both took it out on their respective daughters-in-law. “When one side tyrannised the wife of their son, the other side took revenge by targeting their daughter-in-law,” he says.
Shirin Aqa, another Nangarhar resident, says he knows two cases where girls given in exchange marriages were not allowed into their marital homes for years – considered a terrible shame – until village elders intervened. “Now thank God they are fine,” he adds.
Nazar Mohammad, who lives in the Laghman capital, says his family has suffered. “My two sisters are in exchange marriages. One of them is exchanged for me (His sister is married to his wife’s brother.) If I do not take my wife to my father-in-law’s house they won’t let my sister come to my house,” he says.
Sardar, a resident of Khugiani district in Nangarhar, says exchange marriages have spurred tit-for-tat violence against women. For instance, he says, should the daughter-in-law in one family go to her father’s house, her husband’s family would wonder why their daughter was not sent home. “It could lead to the breaking off of relations between the two sides,” he says. Many exchange marriages are ending in divorce or separation.
The situation is the same in provinces in the south-east. A resident of Khost says even after a woman has had children she could be left at her father’s house in an exchange marriage. “The tyranny over girls is now so serious that families think nothing of coercing their sons into divorcing their wives,” he says.
Mawlawi Ataullah, a religious scientist, says Islam does not sanction exchange marriage because a woman cannot be mehr for another woman.
