Sahar Gul won a tremendous and unsung legal victory in July when an appeals court in Afghanistan upheld the 10-year prison sentences for each of her three in-laws after they locked her up and tortured her. Gul was married to Gulam Sakhi when she was 13 and he was 30, after he paid her stepbrother $5,000, even though she was well below the legal marrying age. When she refused to consummate the marriage, her in-laws tortured her and locked her in a windowless cellar for months. The in-laws received 10-year sentences in May. But many women’s-rights activists view this as a very small victory. One expert said, “We have many cases perhaps graver than this where women are murdered. No one hears anything about them.”
Read it at The New York Times
