In In Focus

Early Marriage: Child Bride

By Breakthrough 27th August, 2014

Afsana, a beautiful child in the Ingil District of Herat Province, wanted to go outside and play with her friends, but instead she found herself in...

In In Focus

Early Marriage: Exchange for a cow

By Breakthrough 27th August, 2014

Several years ago in Pakistan in 2002, I taught fourth grade at a school in an Afghan camp. The school was supported by a German organization calle...

In In Focus

Early Marriage: Selling the daughters

By Breakthrough 27th August, 2014

When I think of early marriage — forced marriage — I become mad and helpless. I have no tolerance for it. I want to shout out loud, so that all cre...

In In Focus

Early Marriage: Not the only destiny

By Breakthrough 27th August, 2014

This is the second part of Early Marriage: Selling the Daughters. If graves and cemeteries could talk, they would tell the stories of those girls w...

In In Focus

Why the girls get sold

By Breakthrough 27th August, 2014

There is always news about Afghanistan on the Yahoo site and recently when I checked the site, a light blue title caught my attention. The news was...

In In Focus

Eight daughters for sale, the oldest first

By Breakthrough 27th August, 2014

One afternoon after Fershta and her sisters returned home from school, their father told them he had decided to sell them, one by one, by having th...

In In Focus

Marrying young in Afghanistan

By Breakthrough 27th August, 2014

Afghanistan has many traditions that allow families to marry their daughters at young ages without their consent. For example, there is a tradition...

In In Focus

The marriage tradeoff

By Breakthrough 27th August, 2014

In the Daykundi province in the center of Afghanistan lived a woman named Rahima who had three sons and a beautiful daughter. Each day she kneaded ...

In In Focus

For Nilab, forced to marry at thirteen

By Breakthrough 27th August, 2014

This story is written for my relative Nilab, an unlucky girl who was born to a family that already had six daughters at home. Nilab’s parents didn’...

In Framing Change

A Short Film: ‘Rashmi Matric Pass’

By Breakthrough 1st November, 2009

A young girl in India has a dream, but what do the elders of the village tell her? Does Rashmi have an ally? This short film explores the importanc...