The price of young love: in Afghanistan, where dating is forbidden, teens who buck the system face the severest of consequences.

• Author: Healy, Jack
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It sounds innocent enough: Two teenagers fall for each other at the ice cream factory where they work and begin a secret romance. But in Afghanistan, a traditional Muslim society where dating is practically nonexistent and parents arrange marriages, such "moral crimes," like falling in love, can be punishable by death.

The trouble started this summer, when Rafi Mohammed, 17, and his girlfriend, Halima Mohammedi, who thinks she's 17*, were spotted together in a car in Herat, in western Afghanistan. A group of men yanked them out into the road and interrogated them: Why were they together? An angry crowd of 300 surged around the couple, calling them adulterers and demanding they be stoned to death or hanged. (In the Koran, Islam's holy book, "adulterer" refers to a person--married or not--who has a sexual relationship outside of marriage.)

When security forces tried to rescue Raft and Halima, the mob exploded in anger. They set fire to cars and stormed a police station outside of Herat.

The riot, which went on for hours, ended with one man dead, a police station charred, and Halima and Raft in juvenile prison. Officially, their fates lie in the hands of an unreliable legal system. But they face even harsher judgments from their communities and families.

"Often you can end up dead," says Tanaz Eshaghian. Her film Love Crimes of Kabul documents the lives of women serving time for what Afghanistan considers moral crimes, from fleeing abusive (and often forced) marriages to allegations of adultery. "It's a way for a family to clean up the stain on their honor."

She adds that dating someone your parents didn't choose is also a financial transgression, since it's customary for a groom's family to pay the father of the bride a lot of money for her.

"You can't just go and do what you want," Eshaghian says, "because the father is expecting to live off the money he was going to get from marriage."

Halima's uncle visited her in jail to tell her she had shamed the family, and he promised that they would kill her once she was released. Her father, an illiterate laborer who works in neighboring Iran, sorrowfully agreed. He cried during two visits to the jail, saying almost nothing to his daughter.

"What we would ask is that the government should kill both of them," he says.

Stoning as punishment for "crimes" like Halima and Rafi's was encouraged under the Taliban. The radical Islamic group enforced a severe...