Updated May 28, 2026 at 11:42 AM PDT
Child marriage has long been a problem in Afghanistan. A 2021 UNICEF report estimated that 28% of Afghan women aged 15–49 years were married before the age of 18.
A new decree issued by the Taliban's Ministry of Justice will add to the numbers, say researchers and activists who follow this issue.
The focus of the law is divorce procedures but it contains several clauses that recognize child marriages.
"This is one of the most worrying legal developments in Afghanistan under the Taliban," says Roqia Saee, one of the founders of the Afghan Women's History Transformation Movement, a group that fights for women's rights that started up in 2022.
A lack of precision about age
According to Article 5 of this new law, the guardian of a child is fully within their right to arrange a marriage for a minor and such a contract would be considered legal.
The law addresses the age of a child bride in a way that's sparked additional outrage, says Fereshta Abbasi, an Afghan human rights lawyer and a researcher at the Human Rights Watch. Article 7 of the new law allows the silence of a virgin girl who has reached puberty to be considered as consent to marriage.
"This was the case even in the previous law; the silence of a woman has always been interpreted as consent. But previously, marriage was allowed between the ages of 15 and 16 with parents' consent," Abbasi says. "Now there is no minimum age."
The decree specifies that the child can seek annulment through a court order but only after reaching puberty. The definition of puberty, however, was not specified.
The law has attracted strong criticism from within and outside Afghanistan, with women's groups and legal scholars equivocally terming it as "dangerous." The U.N.'s Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) referred to the decree as "another step in the erosion of Afghan women and girls' rights."
"The decree further institutionalizes discrimination," said Georgette Gagnon, deputy special representative of the Secretary-General of UNAMA, in a statement, "and, when combined with restrictions on girls' education and women's public participation, entrenches a system in which Afghan women and girls are denied autonomy, opportunity, and access to justice," she added.
Abbasi tells NPR: "A law like this that gives lots of authority to men and literally takes every protection away from women.
"It not only violates the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, especially when it comes to issues of consent, the right to marriage, but also the provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, because it also speaks about children," she says.
The Taliban's changes
While terms of marriage in Afghanistan were always questionable, even under the previous Western-backed government, Abbasi says, the lack of protection mechanisms under the Taliban regime means women are even more vulnerable.
The Taliban have banned women from working in the legal system, forbidding women lawyers and judges and making it harder for women to seek legal support.
Abbasi adds that the human rights group was very concerned about the pace at which the Taliban were passing laws in the last few months. "At least three laws in the past two months, and most of these are extremely repressive against women and girls," she added, referring to the new Criminal Code passed in January this year, which, among other things, legalizes most forms of domestic violence against women, unless it causes severe bodily harm.
Inside Afghanistan, the criticism has manifested in more clandestine forms. A group of anonymous masked women activists, identified as the Women's Courage Movement, shared a video showing them graffitiing the message "No to child marriage" on the walls of an unidentified Afghan town.
"Long-term silence is the cause of increased injustice," the group of masked women chanted in Dari, one of the Afghan languages. "We won't stay silent." Anti-Taliban protests in Afghanistan are banned, and protesters face the risk of severe persecution.
"While much of the world is striving to combat child marriage and protect children's rights, the Taliban has taken the opposite path, allowing it to continue and expand by making it part of the formal legal structure, once again demonstrating that their approach to women and children is based on restrictions and patriarchy," says Roqia Saee of the Afghan Women's History Transformation Movement..
A history of child marriage
While there is no data on child marriage in Afghanistan more recent than the 2021 UNICEF report, several studies document a rise in girls being forced into early marriages since the Taliban takeover.
In 2023, a study by the Organization for Policy Research and Development Studies, an Afghan think tank on women's issues, observed that the regime's edicts were reinforcing structural drivers of early and forced marriage.
"In reaction to Taliban restrictions, there has been an increase in marriages that occur below the age preferred by women [18 to 25] with 69% of respondents knowing a girl married at an inappropriate age," according to the report.
Experts note that the Taliban's fundamentalist policies, their ban on girls' higher education and the worsening economic crisis, have further exacerbated the problem. With an estimate of nearly 85% per cent Afghans struggling to survive, families feel pressure to marry their daughters at a younger age to obtain a dowry — the "bride price."
The lack of age specifications in the decree is singled out for criticism. "Unlike the former civil code, where the marriageable age for girls was 16 years, the new law does not say what the age for marriage is," says Abbasi. "And what worries me about this is that is attempts to regulate and even validate some forms of child marriage while also making it harder for the affected child or woman to get out of it."
"As a girl, under the current system, you no longer have legal protections to go to courts and seek recourse. And the conditions set are very challenging, you need to wait till puberty, you need witnesses, and even something as basic as traveling to the courts, you would need a male guardian," she says, referring to the Taliban's restrictions on women's movements in Afghanistan.
"None of these are easy to pursue for women under the Taliban rule," she says, "And I fear this will encourage more families to engage in such practices."
Abbasi's concerns are echoed by a counselor working on cases of violence against women in Afghanistan. The counselor, who asked to be identified by her initials, NT, for fear of retribution from the Taliban, says she has observed a rise in child marriage cases in her region.
"Even from urban communities," she says, where the rate of child marriage had gone down under the previous government with its investment in advocacy programs to discourage child marriage and emphasis on education for girls.
"When girls cannot go to school, many families see marriage as their only option for the future," NT says. The Taliban have banned all forms of higher education for girls in Afghanistan.
"And in many cases lately, the dowry received in exchange for a bride has also been a reason for families marrying their daughters younger," she says.
One of her clients is a mother whose husband was unemployed and faced crippling debts; she arranged the marriage of her daughter, which would bring a dowry to the family.
"We tried to counsel her against it, and even referred her to donor NGOs for cash assistance to help with their financial situation," she says. "However, the marriage could not be prevented because it was a family matter, and given the conditions in Afghanistan and the existing restrictions, we were not allowed to intervene directly."
She adds that the mother, who had been coming for counseling sessions with NT, has dropped out of further sessions.
Ruchi Kumar is a journalist who reports on conflict, politics, development and culture in India and Afghanistan. She tweets at @RuchiKumar
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