Women's rights in Afghanistan have suffered through tremendous turmoil in the last three decades or in the last quarter of the past century. Through different rulers such as the mujahideen and the Taliban in the later part of the century, women have struggled to gain freedoms and reform a society that is primarily male dominant. Even today, violence against women in Afghanistan is high although the situation is improving slowly as the country progresses with the help of the international community.[1]
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Since Afghanistan was officially declared a country in the mid eighteenth century, it has suffered from weakness due to the different tribal groups and ethnicities.[2] Of all of the tribal groups, the Pashtuns are the largest and then followed by Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks and others. From the late nineteenth century and through the twentieth century the rulers of Afghanistan consistently attempted to lessen women's restrictions in the country. For the most part, these attempts were unsuccessful; however, there were a few leaders who were able to make some significant changes for the time period. Among them was King Amanullah Khan, who ruled from 1919 to 1929 and made some of the more noteworthy changes in an attempt to unify as well as modernize the country.[2]
Amanullah Khan, along with other rulers following him, promoted freedom for women in the public sphere in order to lessen the control that patriarchal families had over women. Amanhullah Khan stressed the importance for young girls and women to receive an education. Along with encouraging families to send their daughters to school, he promoted the unveiling of women and persuaded them to adopt a more western style of dress.[3] In 1921, he created a law that abolished forced marriage, child marriage, bride price, and put restrictions on polygamy, a common practice among households in Afghanistan.[3] However, over time these restrictions became nearly impossible to enforce.
Throughout the nineteenth century, Afghanistan continued to be a country dominated by tribes and men continued to have ultimate control over women. In 1973 the state was declared a republic and throughout the 1970s and 1980s a communist group called the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) took over and attempted to once again reform the marriage laws, women's health laws, and encouraged women's education. During this time Afghanistan made significant advances towards modernization.[4] Minorities of women were able to hold jobs as scientists, teachers, doctors, and civil servants and had a considerable amount of freedom with significant educational opportunities.[5] The majority of women however, lived in poverty and were excluded from these opportunities. In 1977, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) was founded by Meena Keshwar Kamal in Kabul but her office was moved to Quetta in neighboring Pakistan where she was assassinated in 1987.[6] RAWA still operates in the region of Pakistan and Afghanistan.[7]
In April 1992, Afghanistan erupted into a civil war when the Mujahideen took over. The Mujahideen were split into seven different factions who all vied for power leading the country into a violent bloodbath.[4] The Mujahideen declared that all women were to wear a veil and demanded that women who appeared on television be fired.[2] During the violent four-year civil war many women were kidnapped or raped. By the time one of the factions became victorious many people welcomed this new leading force known as the Taliban.[2]
The Taliban are mostly Pashtuns who are almost entirely educated in Wahhabi schools in Pakistan.[2] Immediately after coming into power, the Taliban declared that women were forbidden to go to work and they were not to leave their homes unless accompanied by a male family member. When they did go out it was required that they had to wear an all-covering burqa. Under these restrictions, women were denied an education and were refused health care.[3] Many women were unable to leave their households at all because they couldn’t afford a burqa or they no longer had any male relatives. These women were forced to stay at home and paint their windows so that no one could see in or out.[5] During the Taliban’s rule, women in Afghanistan were essentially put under house arrest and women who once held respectable positions were forced to wander the streets in their burqas selling everything they owned and begging in order to survive.
Because most teachers had been women before the Taliban regime, the new restrictions on women’s employment created a huge lack of teachers, which put an immense strain on the education of both boys and girls. Although women were banned from most jobs, including teaching, women in the medical field were mostly allowed to continue working.[5] This is because the Taliban required that women could be treated only by female physicians. However, women working in the medical field suffered greatly: women who were doctors and nurses were often beaten or had to watch their female colleagues get beaten.[3] Moreover, for several reasons, it was difficult for women to seek medical attention. It was extremely frowned upon for women to need to go to a hospital, and women who did try to go to a hospital were often beaten. Even when a woman was able to make it to a hospital she had no guarantee that she would be seen by a doctor.
After the September 11th attacks on the United States, the U.S. led a bombing campaign on al-Qaeda militants in Afghanistan that ultimately led to the overthrow of the Taliban in November 2001.[5] The Karzai administration has relaxed policies around women's rights, and in Kabul women now can be seen driving cars and engaging in other activities that they would have previously been banned from participating in.[8] However in more remote regions, the Pashtun culture and tribal cultures still often suppress the rights of women.[8]
The most popular traditional work for women in Afghanistan is tailoring, and a large percentage of the population are professional tailors working from home.[9] Since 2002 women have gradually begun to work their way back towards being contributors to the economy. Some women became entrepreneurs by starting own businesses. For example, Meena Rahmani became the first woman in Afghanistan to open a bowling center in Kabul.[10] Many others are employed by companies and small businesses.
In the last decade a large number of women became members of the National Assembly of Afghanistan (Afghan Parliament), such as Shukria Barakzai, Fauzia Gailani, Nilofar Ibrahimi[2], Fauzia Koofi[11], Malalai Joya, and many others. Several women also took positions as ministers, including Suhaila Seddiqi, Sima Samar, Husn Banu Ghazanfar, and Soraya Dalil. Habiba Sarabi, who belongs to the minority Hazara group, became the first female governor in Afghanistan. She also served as Minister of Women's Affairs. Azra Jafari is a female mayor in Nili, the capital of Daykundi Province.
The Afghan National Police, Afghan National Army and Afghan Air Force have some female officers but many more are being recruited. Their numbers are growing slowly as more women are trained to perform their duty on an international level. Many believe that this will open doors for other institutions to hire women in the future.
Because Afghanistan has a struggling economy overwhelmed with massive unemployment and poverty, women often cannot find work where they receive sufficient pay.[3] One area of the economy where women do play a significant role is in agriculture. Of the 80 percent of Afghans employed in the agriculture field or similar occupations, 30 percent of them are women.[3] In some areas in Afghanistan, women may spend as much time working on the land as men do, but still often earn three times less than men in wages.[3]
In terms of percentage women also rank high in the fields of medicine and media, and are slowly working their way into the field of justice. Because women are still highly encouraged to consult a female physician when they go to the hospital, nearly fifty percent of all Afghans in the medical profession are women.[3] The number of women having professions in the media is also rising. Currently there are more than ten television stations that have all female anchors as well as female producers.[3] As women are given more opportunities in education and the workforce, more of them are turning towards careers in medicine, media, and justice.
However, even the women that are given the opportunity to have careers have to struggle to balance their home life with their work life. Since the economy is so weak, very few women can afford servants so they are forced to take care of all the household work primarily on their own.[3] Those who choose to work must labour twice as hard because they are essentially holding two jobs.
Education in Afghanistan is very low, especially for women. Approximately 15% of females can read and write but this is now increasing due to the high number of girls attending schools throughout the country.[12] As of 2011, there are around 8 million students in Afghanistan, 37% of them are females.[13][14]
In the early twentieth century, education for women was extremely rare due to the lack of schools for girls. Occasionally girls were able to receive an education on the primary level but they never moved past the secondary level.[3] During King Zaher Shah's reign in the mid twentieth century education for women became a priority and young girls began being sent to schools. At these schools, girls were taught discipline, new technologies, ideas, and socialization in society.[3]
Kabul University was opened to girls in 1947 and by 1973 there was an estimated 150,000 girls in schools across Afghanistan.[3] Unfortunately, marriage at a young age added to the high drop out rate but more and more girls were entering professions that were once viewed as only being for men.[3] Women were being given new opportunities to earn better lives for both themselves and their families. However, in the after the civil war and the takeover by the Taliban, women were stripped of these opportunities and sent back to lives where they were to stay at home and be controlled by their husbands and fathers.
During the Taliban regime, many women who had previously been teachers began secretly giving an education to young girls (as well as some boys) in their neighborhoods, teaching from ten to sixty children at a time.[5] The homes of these women became community homes for girls and women and were entirely financed and managed by women. News about these secret schools spread through word of mouth from woman to woman. Each day young girls would hide all their school supplies, such as books, notebooks and pencils, underneath their burqas and risk their lives to go to school.[5] At these schools, young women were taught basic literary skills, numeracy skills, and various other subjects such as biology, chemistry, English, Quranic Studies, cooking, sewing, and knitting.[5] Many women involved in teaching were caught by the Taliban and persecuted, jailed, and tortured.[5]
Since 2001 many children have returned to school despite opposition by the Taliban. Over the years the Taliban has burned down numerous schools and killed many teachers, yet people still want their children to learn, and the number of Afghan children in schools rises each year. In the first few years after the Taliban was overthrown, education for girls continued to struggle. In 2006 it was reported that 74 percent of girls in Afghanistan dropped out of school before finishing primary school.[3] This high percentage was due to many factors including marriage, family obligations, and a real fear of the Taliban’s continued presence within Afghanistan.[3] However, in subsequent years the number of students in schools continues to rise because people want their children to learn so that they can earn better professions and support the family. Schools keep being opened in Afghanistan and in 2008 there were an estimated 5.8 million children attending schools, roughly 40 percent being girls.[3] As the number the children attending school rises each year, so does the number of girls who are attending.
Afghanistan is a patriarchal society where it is commonly believed that men are entitled to make decisions for women, include those pertaining to engagement and marriage.[15]
Arranged marriages are common for women in Afghanistan and they are done mostly for political and economic reasons. A girl's father has the ultimate authority over who he believes his daughter should marry. It is not uncommon for girls to be engaged even before they are born. Girls are often married off at a very young age to wealthy men who are much older than themselves. Reports have even indicated that in the most poverty-stricken areas of rural Afghanistan, families have been reduced to selling their daughters to much older men in exchange for food.
After a marriage is arranged, the two families sign an engagement contract that both parties are socially and culturally obligated to honor. After this contract is signed, the bride is forbidden to marry another man.[16] If the bride dies before the marriage, her family is required to give her sister as a bride or find another desirable replacement.[16]
It is common among low-income families in most areas of the country for the groom to pay a bride price to the bride's family.[15] The price is negotiated among the heads of the family; the bride herself is not included in the negotiation process. The bride price is viewed as compensation for the money that the bride's family has had to spend on her care and upbringing.[15] There have been many instances where a family is so stricken by poverty that a father will betroth his daughters to multiple men and collect the bride price from each of them.[15] The resulting disputes, although addressed by the courts, often lead to violent reprisals. Girls are sometimes also bartered in a traditional method of dispute resolution called baad that proponents say helps avoid violence between families, although the girls themselves are often subject to considerable violence both before and after marrying into a family through baad.[17]
Once a girl is married she becomes the property of her new family and continues to have little to no control over her situation. In family matters, the girl's mother-in-law and her husband have the most control. It is the mother-in-law, for example, who decides whether or not her pregnant daughter-in-law should go to the hospital or not.[3]
Only men have the right to divorce their spouses, and a man may divorce his wife without her consent. Social and cultural beliefs make it nearly impossible for a woman to initiate a divorce and it is considered extremely shameful for a woman to want one.[3] However, if a divorce does take place the husband receives custody of all the adult children and the wife receives custody of the young children only until they reach adulthood, at which time the husband receives custody.[3] Divorce is extremely difficult for women to obtain, and divorced women are often treated as social outcasts for the rest of their lives.
The burqa is a long garment, covering the entire body, with only a cloth grid allowing the wearer to see out. An early record of this dress was made during the British exploration of Afghanistan in the First Anglo-Afghan War when some officers made lithographs picturing the burqa. During the Taliban regime in the 1990s all women in Afghanistan were forced to wear the burqa in public places.[4]
A burqa is extremely hot to wear and this produces a bad odor inside. Wearers may feel claustrophobic and are at higher risk for asthma.[18] Dust kicked up from the streets sticks to the cloth in front of the mouth that becomes damp from breathing, leading to a sense of suffocation in stale air.[18] The mesh opening severely restricts one's range of vision and is said to be like wearing horse blinders. Consequently, women wearing the burqa often have difficulty even seeing where they are going.
It is impossible to tell whether a woman wearing a burqa is smiling or crying or showing any other emotion. Women say that this leads to a feeling of being completely invisible.[4]
Reports from 2008 stated that many Afghan women were still unable to leave their homes without wearing the burqa, more than six years after the end of the Taliban regime.[3]
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