1 Introduction
It has been two years since the fall of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the re-emergence of the Taliban and the Islamic Emirate. During that time the Taliban have issued over 100 edicts targeting women and girls, and aiming to seriously curtail women’s rights, education, employment and mobility (Akbari and True, 2022).
The international actors including Western donors, aid agencies and think-tanks, that once expressed hope that the Taliban may have changed (Jackson and Amiri, 2019) encountered a group that was more politically and diplomatically savvy, but no more amenable to changing its core values. Many states, in the Global North and Global South, including some members of the UN Security Council, have called on the Taliban to reverse direction and respect basic human rights if they want international recognition. Yet instead of lifting their restrictions on women, the Taliban doubled down (UN, 2023).
In a recent report (UN-OHCHR and HCR, 2023) the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Afghanistan and the Working Group on discrimination against women and girls suggested that the discrimination being faced by women and girls in Afghanistan is tantamount to ‘gender persecution’ and expressed concern at ‘the normalisation of the systematic violation of the rights of women and girls’ that has taken place since the fall of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan on 15 August 2021 (pp 3-4). The rapid erosion of women’s rights under the Taliban regime has created profound fear and psychological distress among Afghan women and girls; but to what extent and of what kind? In March 2023, we used BISHNAWWAWRA (meaning ‘listen’ in Dari – Pashto), a digital platform that captures the voices of Afghan women in real-time and on a diversity of issues2 to conduct a survey to gauge how these human rights violations were impacting Afghan women, and in particular women’s mental health. In total, 2,112 female respondents were surveyed in over 17 provinces. In April 2023, focus group discussions were conducted with 159 women in 11 provinces. The purpose of the study was to gather data and women’s own accounts that could illuminate the extent of this crisis and provide recommendations for regional and international stakeholders, and the Afghan diaspora, on addressing it.
Read the full report here