‘I married off my daughter so that none of us would die of hunger.” Malika hesitated before saying the words aloud. The 46-year-old lives with her husband and four youngest children (three girls and a boy) in Chihil Dukhtarān, one of Kabul’s poorest neighbourhoods.
Poverty pushed the family to the brink before Malika and her husband made what they describe as the hardest decision of their lives: marrying off their eldest daughter, Maryam, for 200,000 afghanis (£2,270). She was still a teenager.
