Do Muslims Sell Their Own Children For Sex?

Why and How a Western Narrative to Degrade a Religion is Constantly Used

Are these women off to the market to sell their children to grown men? [photo used under fair use for questioning the reality of the Western media framing]

Selling your child is not a family value. If you’re desperate to eat, selling off a child to an adult man should not be a solution. Doesn’t Islam say anything about selling your children or family?

Again, it’s a question of trusting the media. I honestly don’t know whether this happens only in this case in Afghanistan, under a specific interpretation of Islam by this community, or if it’s Islam-wide.

Thus, I’m left with more questions than answers. Western readers are left with the impression that this is either a norm in the Muslim world or that it can happen under Muslim law. Is this practiced in other Muslim countries?

What values do the Taliban hold that allow the selling off of family members? I thought they were supposed to be “super moral” and “ultra-conservative.” Instead, they are depraved.

Here’s the reporting from the Guardian:

“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.”

I happen to know that Afghanistan, under 20 years of American military occupation, passed laws establishing a minimum age for marriage. After they passed the law to protect children from forced marriage, only two countries were left without a minimum age law to prevent forced marriage: America and Yemen. The Taliban may have reversed the law since America left.

Other Muslims have a minimum age law to prevent forced child marriage. Whether the law is routinely violated is another story, and people disobey it and continue with cultural norms that run counter to the law.

But this article not only masks the American national government’s depravity and utter failure but also the vast ignorance of the people who celebrate democracy while allowing authoritarianism to be practiced daily by NOT passing a minimum age law for marriage to protect children. It also gives the impression that the Muslim religion universally allows the practice because Western society is ignorant of how the laws in Muslim countries work, how many are secular, and how the religion is interpreted in different countries to allow child marriage to be tolerated outside the law, where the minimum age is typically set at 16–18 legally.

If you are Muslim, you probably feel like I’m not being fair somehow. But that stems only from blanket ignorance and the way the articles are presented. Most outlets outside The Guardian, especially in America, let the idea of “terrorists” be associated with Muslims to paint a broad brush and justify the American wars of aggression in that region. Such clever narrative deception supports the enormous military budget and, worse, the military allocation or budgetary expense of $2.06 trillion in 2026 — sorry, I just looked and got an update; it is now a whopping $2.58 TRILLION allocated for the Department of Defense — while allowing American military outlets to show “good Muslim” stories when they need to in response to pushback.

I don’t see many of those in Western media. That’s the problem. This illustrative story of a woman selling her child for money, human trafficking by a mother, is sickening and sad, but it is used to reflect Muslims, radicalizing them as people willing to sell their female children for sex through marriage.

Yes, the story is tragic, but it is not illustrative. Now counternarratives are. Instead of choosing other stories, the Western media continues to choose “Taliban” stories, and the Taliban make it easy to find and present them. How does this end? How can this persistent misperception be countered in the West?

From the link provided above to the USA Government’s own website showing how much Congress allocates for defense spending in 2026. It’s obscene. Notice the “military budget” isn't listed here because the $1.15 trillion media people cite isn't from the government; it's from the media. That budget is part of the $1.66 trillion already “spent” or “obligated.” [Source: USASpending.gov]