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Monday marked the start of the “16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence” around the world. It’s an annual opportunity, observed from November 25 to December 10, to highlight the issue, to call for accountability, and to demand action from decision makers.
Violence against girls and women is truly a global problem, as a few statistics from the UNdemonstrate. One in four adolescent girls is abused by their partner. One in three women experience violence in their lifetime. Last year, partners and family members killed a girl or woman intentionally every ten minutes.
That’s the world we live in – and need to change.
Gender-based violence sometimes also takes on specific characteristics depending on the country. On Monday, we looked at rampant sexual violence by criminal gangs in Haiti, for example. Today, we’re talking about Afghanistan.
The violence Afghan girls and women face under Taliban rule continues to shock and appall in its scope and its cruelty. It is, as HRW’s Sahar Fetrat writes, “structural and systematic.”
The Taliban bars girls from education beyond the sixth grade. This alone limits their futures severely. But of course, that’s not the only gender-based rule in place.
The Taliban have also blocked women from many forms of employment and restricted their movement in public. A woman cannot leave her house without a male family member chaperoning her.
The Taliban have published new laws that require women to completely cover their bodies, including their faces, in public at all times. They have also declared that women should not be heard speaking or singing in public.
The Taliban base all this on their twisted interpretation of Islam. No other Muslim-majority country has such extreme restrictions on girls and women.
For more than three years, the Taliban have systematically erased women from public life, and making it even worse, the international community has occasionally joined in. For example, the UN excluded Afghan women from the Doha 3 meeting in June, a gathering intended to help coordinate the global approach to the country.
Today is day three of the global “16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence,” or #16Days, as it’s also known. It’s a crucial moment to understand and address a worldwide problem – and to realize the international community can do a lot better in specific countries, like Afghanistan.
