A 10-year-old girl, brutally raped, confronts her attacker in court.
The culprit — a cleric — tries to pass it off as “consensual sex.”
A judge sentences him to 20 years and some $30,000 in fines.
What’s extraordinary is that these scenes played out Saturday in a courtroom in Kabul, Afghanistan.
The case is being hailed by women’s rights groups and activists as a watershed moment, in a country where women are still the targets of violence, despite reforms since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.
“This case shows the level of cruelty that children in Afghanistan face,” said Horia Mosadiq, an Afghanistan researcher with Amnesty International. “This is not an isolated case.”
What’s unusual about this case is that the victim had the courage to step forward, said Naheed Samadi Bahram, program director for Women for Afghan Women, or WAW, an international women’s rights organization helping with the case CNN informs.
