Fatima’s Taliban husband was so controlling that he refused to allow her to bathe and threatened to burn her face if she dared wear make up, suspicious that his 12-year-old Afghan wife was trying to make herself attractive to other men.

He would not let her step outside their home in Afghanistan’s western Farah Province, even when she fell sick, and beat her for burning her hand baking bread, complaining that her mother had taught her nothing to justify the dowry he paid.

“My father sold me to a man at a time when I didn’t know anything about the responsibilities of marriage,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview from the capital, Kabul, where she and her young daughter are hiding.

Invisible Taliban child brides, widows trapped as sex slaves – Reuters