If you heard that a man was thinking about selling his seven-year-old daughter into marriage or domestic servitude, who would you feel sorry for? The dad or the girl? The man treating his own child as property to be traded for cash, or his daughter, the innocent made into chattel for gross creeps to barter over so that they might secure themselves a child bride?
All normal people would say the daughter. Of course we would. Not the BBC, though. Our public broadcaster has told precisely this horror story, only it paints the men selling their daughters as the victims, not the girls who are being sold. Meet the ‘Afghan fathers’ who are ‘forced to make impossible choices’, it blubs, blissfully unaware of how sick it sounds to the rest of us to play a tiny violin for men who sell girls into slavery.
In the BBC’s telling, the suffering of the girls who face a life of gruelling servitude – or worse – seems almost an afterthought
It’s a report from Afghanistan. Of course it is. The BBC informs us that hard-up Afghan men gather in dusty town squares every morning in search of work. Sometimes they get it, most times they don’t. Things have become so tough that some men are selling their own children on the black market. But only their girls, naturally. One sold his five-year-old daughter. Another is considering selling his seven-year-old twins. Maybe for marriage, he says, maybe for domestic work.
It is clear from the outset where the Beeb’s sympathies lie. The headline to its report laments the ‘impossible choices’ these poor dads face. It tells us of their ‘weary faces’, of their struggle to find work, of their ‘parched lips’, of how ‘distressed and confused’ they feel. In the BBC’s telling, the suffering of the girls who face a life of gruelling servitude – or worse – seems almost an afterthought. The ‘distress’ of the girl-sellers seems to count for more than the barbarous enslavement of the girls.
Where the men’s mental struggles are drawn in detail – we hear of their pain-etched faces and empty stomachs – the girls’ enslavement is described almost matter-of-factly. ‘Underage [marriages] have their problems’, the Beeb quotes one of the dads as saying. Call off the hunt for the grossest understatement of the year. It is the stuff of moral oblivion to refer to girls being sold for cash as a ‘problem’. Only those who have fully vacated the realm of morality could report so tamely and flatly on the trafficking of girls into a life of rape dolled up as ‘marriage’.
There was another way the BBC could have told this story. The right way. It could have focused on the hellish trials of girls and women in the misogynist tyranny of Afghanistan. It could have told us how ‘weary’ the girls looked, these poor innocents facing potential paedophilic enslavement. It could have said there is never any excuse for bartering with the life of a girl. Not hunger, not unemployment – none of it justifies looking at your sweet daughter and wondering how much she might fetch on a marriage market.
Why didn’t it do that? Why did it instead bewail the supposed agonies of the men overseeing this diabolical trade? I think it’s because of our old friend, cultural relativism. According to the baleful ideology of non-judgementalism, it is unacceptable to say some cultures are morally inferior to others. That some men in distant lands behave in a truly regressive, even medieval fashion that falls far short of our own moral standards.
It is ‘bigotry’, apparently, to draw such distinctions. All cultures are ‘valid’, right? Hence we end up with the BBC reporting on the enslavement of Afghan girls as if it were a cultural quirk. ‘There is a tradition [in Afghanistan]’, it breezily tells us, ‘in which a marital gift is given to the family of the girl from the family of the boy during marriage’.
The euphemisms are suffocating. ‘Marital gift’ – you mean cash for girls? As for ‘boy’ – come on, BBC, you know those girls aren’t marrying boys. You know it is seen as acceptable in Islam for very young girls to get hitched to men. And you know – surely? – that that is bad. That it is immoral, wicked, and alien to everything we in the civilised West hold dear. Why can’t you say it? Why did you say ‘culture’ rather than using the far more apt word for this market in girls’ flesh – barbarism?
The cult of ‘Islamophobia’ has fried people’s minds. It has left them thinking that any criticism of Islamic practices is by definition bigoted. We arrive at a situation where even the public broadcaster tiptoes around the truth of a benighted, medieval nation in which women are forcefully cloaked in black cloth, forbidden from speaking in public, and treated as the property of men. That culture is horrific, it is a stain on humanity’s conscience, and it deserves to die.
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