The Taliban’s seizure of Kabul on August 15, 2021 has considerably altered the group’s role. But this time around, the leaders of the Taliban have been much more tactful. To establish legitimacy, the Taliban have gone out of their way to present a more moderate image of themselves to the world by vowing to respect women’s rights and freedom.
But in reality, each passing day has only brought a stream of bad news for women and girls in Afghanistan. Evidence emerging from the ground suggests that the group has been undertaking many regressive steps to reduce the spaces for women to freely express themselves.
The diktat
Ever since coming to power nationwide, the Taliban were swift enough to issue new codes of conduct for the Afghan women, restricting their mobility and taking away their free will. They mandated that women wear clothes that completely covered their hair, body and most of the face; they also stipulated that women had to have male chaperones when leaving their homes. While these practices remain perfectly in line with the regime’s old order of the 1990s, the newly issued diktat is only one example of how the Taliban, under the garb of imposing Islamic law, have begun snatching away the rights of the Afghan women.
No school, jobs
The Taliban repeatedly assured women access to education and employment — which formed an important part of its promise to treat women differently under its new rule. Instead, many women are now without jobs; they have been asked to stay away from work. Despite the fact that women comprised over 27% of the workforce in government jobs under the previous civilian administration, the Taliban have gone ahead and imposed restrictions even on these female city government employees by barring them from returning to work; men are to fill up the resultant vacancies. Therefore, the new Taliban government has only male officials who are now responsible for making all the decisions, including those that concern women.
In the education sector, the Taliban’s Ministry of Education issued an order for male students and teachers from Classes 6 to 12 are to report to their schools, with no mention about schoolgirls. A recent BBC report says that a top Taliban official has confirmed that girls will remain banned from attending secondary school. Teachers have also been reporting a worrying drop in the attendance of girls in primary schools.
But while segregating classes on the basis of gender is one side of the story, snatching away from girls their right of education altogether brings with it a grave risk of pushing them towards poverty and backwardness. It could very well dent all the progress that has been achieved by Afghan women in the past, where female participation in education was as high as 65%, with many girls in school and thousands at university. Just last year, girls accounted for 39% of the country’s 9.5 million students.
When will these girls be allowed to return to school? Or will they be allowed to return at all? These questions remain unanswered.
Special decree
On December 3, the Taliban issued a special decree on women’s rights, which outlined rules governing marriage and property for Afghan women. The decree stated that “adult women’s consent is necessary during marriage” and that a widow has a fixed share in her husband’s property. Though a welcome move, the decree — in its practical form — does little to solve the larger problems before the women of Afghanistan.
For instance, at no point does the decree explicitly talk about the widespread issue of child marriage that has been prevalent even before the Taliban came to power and continues to be a issue of concern for the international community. According to a UNICEF estimate (November 2021), “28 per cent of Afghan women aged 15-49 years were married before the age of 18”. And these numbers have only risen with the COVID-19 pandemic, the on-going food crisis, the onset of winter, and political instability. The decree also contains levels of ambiguity in the sense that while talking about the consent of adult women, it does not specify who can be classified as these “adult women”. Neither does it specify how the Islamist group intends to implement these provisions in a country where impoverished families consider marrying off their daughters as a viable option to overcome financial hardships.
But what is even more disturbing is that the decree has conveniently summarised all rights of women only in the context of marriage, providing an important insight into Taliban’s thinking vis-à-vis women. As such, the decree even fails to mention anything about women’s access to education or employment.
Obliteration of services
Gender-based violence is one of the most pervasive problems. Studies suggest that nearly 87% of Afghan women experience at least one form of violence — physical, sexual or psychological — and almost 62% experience multiple forms.
But prior to the Taliban taking over the country, many women and girl survivors of gender-based violence had access to shelters and essential services such as medical treatment, psychological support and pro bono legal representation. Survivors were in fact granted access to the system through the provincial and capital offices of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and the Human Rights Commissions. And even though these systems were not entirely perfect, they did assist thousands of women in Afghanistan each year.
Under the Taliban, shelters are being closed and detainees being released from prison, which includes many of those convicted of offences related to gender-based violence, thereby endangering the lives of the survivors.
The Taliban’s new government has also replaced the Women’s Affairs Ministry with the Ministry for the Promotion/Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice and erased the most important legal mechanism — the Elimination of Violence against Women, 2009 — a law that criminalised rape, battery and forced marriage.
Thus, extrapolating from these examples, it would be correct to state that within four months of being in power in Kabul, the hard-line Islamist group has adopted stringent policies that considerably limit women’s rights and freedoms in Afghanistan — dress codes, a bar on education and employment, confinement to the domestic sphere and curtailed access to services. All these moves are, nonetheless, a true exposition of the Taliban’s seriousness on granting liberty to Afghan women. After all, the leopard has not really changed its spots.
Akanksha Khullar is the Country Coordinator for India at the Women’s Regional Network
