The Taliban regained control of Afghanistan five years ago this week, returning to power after two decades and restoring an Islamic government that had severely restricted women’s rights.
In those few years, women and girls have been systematically erased from most public life, experts say. And, some add, the limitations imposed on half the population could hobble Afghanistan far into the future.
The harsh restrictions on women and girls are a return to conditions that prevailed the previous time the Taliban controlled Afghanistan, in the late 1990s. More than 160 decrees have been issued targeting women and girls, barring them from secondary and higher education and restricting their employment, movement, dress, speech and decision-making.
“No other country in modern times has dismantled the rights of half its population through law, policy and practice to the same extent,” the United Nations agency on women said on Wednesday. “At the same time, overlapping humanitarian and economic crises and deepening poverty are also having a disproportionate impact on women and girls.”
The official restrictions have reinforced social pressures, and many women say their communities increasingly press them to conform, a new U.N. Women report found, based on recent surveys. “Half a decade of escalating restrictions has narrowed where Afghan women can go, what they can do and how they can live,” it said. “The results are alarming.”
The agency surveyed about 5,000 Afghans in rural and urban communities this past spring and last year, asking women and men about life under the Taliban. There were some similarities in the genders’ answers — but some very stark differences as well.
Many Afghans surveyed expressed disappointment with the course of their lives in recent years. Still, women reported levels of isolation and distress that suggest a growing mental health crisis, the U.N. report said.
More than half of men surveyed — about 55 percent — said their lives were worse than they had expected they would be before August 2021, compared with 65 percent of women who reported a similar sentiment. But their reasoning was starkly different.
Male respondents reported frustration with a lack of economic opportunities, while many women also blamed reduced access to education, for themselves or their children, and rules restricting women’s jobs and lives.
“By closing off education and many forms of employment, these restrictions compound the economic pressures already felt by most women,” the U.N. report said, noting the “profound personal toll” the situation has had on women in Afghanistan. Many women reported rising stress, worry and pressure, “consistent with wider evidence of deteriorating mental health,” it added.
The report highlights the isolation many Afghan women now experience as a result of the restrictions. A vast majority of the women surveyed — 90 percent — said they must have a male family member’s permission to leave the house. And more than half said they went out only once or twice a month. Among male survey respondents, more than 95 percent reported leaving their homes daily.
Women and girls’ adherence to the new Taliban rules is increasingly reinforced by people around them, like relatives and neighbors. The U.N. report noted that nearly 40 percent of women surveyed this year said they felt more pressure than before to tailor their behavior for fear that those they know will report them for inappropriate dress, speech or actions.
“The Taliban have extended state control deep into the private sphere by transforming patriarchal norms into legal obligations and conscripting families into the enforcement of their ideology,” Belquis Ahmadi, a human rights lawyer and expert on Afghanistan, formerly at the United States Institute of Peace, wrote in a recent report on Taliban rule.
Human rights experts say that the crisis for women in Afghanistan has reached a critical point.
Afghanistan is the only country in the world to formally prohibit access to education for girls and women beyond the primary level. The longer women and girls are excluded from schools, institutions and public life, the more entrenched the restrictive system becomes, the further behind they fall and the fewer models there are, making their ability to recover ever less likely, jeopardizing the country’s long-term prospects.
“As a new generation of girls grows without an education, their future becomes increasingly dark,” UNESCO wrote in a statement this week, calling for the full restoration of the right to education for Afghan girls and women.
Ms. Ahmadi wrote in her analysis, “Behind every Taliban decree is a human story: a university student packing away her books, a teacher dismissed from the profession she loves, a judge forced into hiding, a doctor prevented from treating patients, an entrepreneur closing her business, or a young girl asking her parents why she is no longer allowed to learn while her brother walks freely to school.”
She argues that the international community must speak up for the silenced.
“The greatest danger facing Afghanistan today is not only that 20 million women and girls are being systematically erased from public life,” Ms. Ahmadi wrote. “It is that the world is slowly learning to live with it.”
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