by Brendan O’Neill, Spectator
f 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.
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.
Read also: Why did the BBC downplay the horror of Afghan men selling their daughters? by Janet Murray, spiked