“The problem with baad is it doesn’t normally appease the people,” Ms Gross said. “It appeases them to the extent that they don’t kill someone from the other side, but not enough to treat the girl right.”

There is no official count of the number of girls given each year in baad, but in Kunar Province, where Shakila’s case took place, the director of the women’s office and a female member of Kunar’s provincial council said that they were aware of one or two cases every month from the province and that many cases never came to light. They had not heard of Shakila’s situation.

A Heavy Toll on Women

A 2010 United Nations report on harmful traditional practices described baad as “still pervasive” in rural areas.

Interviews in nine Pashtun-majority provinces with government representatives, women on provincial councils, male elders and other prominent women produced a stream of stories of abuse, suicide and rape. They found that virtually everyone knew about the practice, many were ashamed of it and most people knew someone personally who had been affected by it. Afghanistan outlawed baad in 2009 when it enacted the Elimination of Violence Against Women Act, but enforcement has been spotty, especially in southern and eastern Afghanistan, according to the United Nations.

Shakila’s family, like many in rural Kunar Province, did not oppose baad, but objected that the jirga adjudicating her case had not yet issued its ruling and that Shakila had been betrothed as an infant to a cousin in Pakistan. Under the Pashtun code, the family said, she was not available to be given because she was the property of another man. (Such betrothals are illegal but common in rural Pashtun areas.)

“We did not mind giving girls,” said her father, Gul Zareen. “But she was not mine to give.”

Views of baad differ sharply between men and women, with more men seeing it as a way of preserving families and stopping blood feuds, and women seeing it in terms of the suffering of the young girl asked to pay for another’s wrongs.

“Giving baad has good and bad aspects,” said Fraidoon Mohmand, a member of Parliament from Nangarhar Province, who has led a number of jirgas. “The bad aspect is that you punish an innocent human for someone else’s wrongdoings, and the good aspect is that you rescue two families, two clans, from more bloodshed, death and misery.”