Imagine this. A woman gets beaten, sexually-abused, tortured and forced into prostitution by her husband. When she cannot take it anymore, she runs away and informs the police about the brutality. The police, far from trying to help her, put her behind bars. Her crime? That she ran away from home.

This is the plight of some 400 women in Afghanistan who are languishing in prisons for "moral crimes" - such as, resisting marriage, marrying without the family's consent, adultery and running away from home, even if they've fled an abusive environment. More shockingly even if a woman is raped she could be imprisoned because it counts as sex outside of marriage. In short, it counts as adultery.

The above details, and more, have been disclosed in a report "I Had To Run Away" published by Human Rights Watch on Wednesday the 28th of March. The report is based on interviews with imprisoned Afghan women, who have been jailed all sorts of "moral crimes". The report says that their so called crimes "usually involve flight from unlawful forced marriage or domestic violence. Some women and girls have been convicted of zina, sex outside of marriage, after being raped or forced into prostitution."

Many of these women have their children with them, as most of them were born in the prisons. When these children will reach five years of age, they will be taken away and put into boarding schools.

Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, is pressing for the release of these women. He has called on Afghan president Hamid Karzai to immediately intervene in the matter.

The Taliban regime was overthrown a decade ago, but the Afghan women still face the brunt of an extremely parochial society, where the man gets away scot-free and the woman is unfairly accused and punished.

The Afghan government is trying its best to underplay the report. A spokesman admitted that while women did face problems in the country ravaged by war, conditions for them had drastically improved since the days of the Taliban.

The report too did admit that under President Hamid Karzai there have been significant improvements "in education, maternal mortality, employment, and the role of women in public life and governance", but, " the imprisonment of women and girls for "moral crimes" is just one sign of the difficult present and worrying future faced by Afghan women and girls".

Many of the women who were interviewed actually were afraid to go home, even if released. They said that they could be killed for bringing disgrace to the family. Honor killings, as these murders have come to be called, are also common in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan Human rights