No Human Rights for Women in Afghanistan

Women’s Rights in War Torn Afghanistan: Pervasive Poverty, Oppression and Abuse

By Dana Visalli
Global Research, March 25, 2014
Url of this article:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/womens-rights-in-war-torn-afghanistan-pervasive-poverty-oppression-and-abuse/5375124

“When I was young I had not courage, but now I have courage.”  Asra, a 12 year-old Afghan girl who lived in a refugee camp in Pakistan until she was 9

Afghanistan has been called ‘the worst place in the world to be a woman,’1 because not only is the poverty pervasive and the lifespan short, but while they are alive many women live like serfs. Afghan students at the private school for girls where I work in Kabul recently produced a series of essays in which they describe the social norms for women in their country. One wrote, ‘A girl in my culture marries at eleven or twelve years of age.  Some parents make their daughters marry when they are very young so they can get money for their daughter and the family can be rich. When a girl is married, she accepts her husband’s orders; she must never tell people if she is being treated badly.’ Another of the girls was more blunt: ‘When sisters sit together, they always praise their brothers; when brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to others.’2

Human Rights Watch said in a recent report that the situation for women in Afghanistan is ‘dismal in every area,’ with violence against them ‘endemic’ and a government that fails to protect them from crimes such as rape and murder.3 The report cites cases where rapists have been pardoned by the government, girls and women have been imprisoned for running away from home, rape victims have been charged with adultery and where women in public life have been murdered. Afghan women’s rights activist Malalai Joya writes that, ‘The U. S. presence in Afghanistan is doing nothing to protect Afghan women. The level of self-immolation among women was never as high as it is now. There is no justice for women.’4 She contends that the overall situation for women has in some ways gotten worse during the 13 year U.S. occupation because the U.S. financed the Islamic fundamentalist mujahideen during the war with the Russians and allowed them to control the Afghan government after the fall of the Taliban.  Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the executive director of UN Women, says attacks against women and girls have increased at a frightening pace. In 2012, female casualties increased by 20 percent over the previous year, and then by 61 percent in 2013.5

As disturbing as this news is, the oppression of and violence towards women in Afghanistan is in no way unique. While researching their book Half the Sky:Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn discovered what they called a ‘pandemic’ of abuse of females by men around the world. To begin with, in China, India and elsewhere female fetuses are regularly aborted in favor of male babies; demographers say that more than 100 million females are ‘missing’ from the world due to what they call ‘gendercide.’ Once born, the British medical journal The Lancelet estimates that among the very poor of the world 1 million children are forced into prostitution every year, and the total number of prostituted children could be as high as 10 million.  130 million women alive today have endured genital mutilation, the cutting out of portions of their reproductive system, in order to destroy any sexuality.6

The United States is certainly not immune to gender abuse; one study found that over 22 million women in the United States have been raped in their lifetime. Every two minutes someone is sexually assaulted in the United States, and somewhere in America a woman is battered, usually by her intimate partner, every 15 seconds. An estimated 17,500 women and children are trafficked into the United States annually for sexual exploitation or forced labor.7

The most relevant question that can be asked is, ‘Why is this happening?’  From a historical perspective this perverse dynamic beween the sexes has distant roots.  In Ancient Greece, Athenian women were given no education and were married at puberty to grown men. They remained forever the property of their fathers, who could divorce them and make them marry another. They lived in segregation and could not leave the house without a chaperone. They could not buy or sell land. If one were raped her husband had either to divorce her or lose his citizenship.8

The Bible and the Koran both reflect the mores at the time of their writing, and perpetuate male dominance into the present through their social paradigms.  In the Old Testament, Genesis 3:16 instructs women that, ‘Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee,’ and Ephesians 5:22 commands, ‘Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord.’  Such teachings prompted 19th-century feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton to write: ‘The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of woman’s emancipation.’9

Similar passages are found in the Koran, such as 4:34: ‘Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other. Good women are obedient. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and forsake them in beds apart, and beat them.’10

The Catholic Pope Innocent issued a Papal Bull in 1484 on the problem of demons in which he initiated the systematic accusation, torture and execution of countless ‘witches’ all over Europe, all of the females.  Innocent commissioned a document called Hammer of Witches which basically said that if you were accused of witchcraft, you were a witch.  Torture was an unfailing means to demonstrate the validity of the accusation. The most fantastic testimony was readily accepted—that tens of thousands of witches had gathered for a Sabbath in public squares in France, or that 12,000 of them darkened the skies as they flew to Newfoundland. The Bible had counseled, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’; so legions of women were burned to death.11

There were strong erotic and misogynistic elements, as might be expected in a sexually repressed, male-dominated society with inquisitors drawn from the class of nominally celibate priests.  The trials paid close attention to the quality and quantity of orgasm in the supposed copulations of defendants with demons or the Devil. No one knows how many women were killed altogether—perhaps hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. 12

A best-selling book titled Advice to a Daughter published in London in the early 1700s, and widely read in the American colonies, gives the flavor of a woman’s station in that time. ‘There is Inequality in Sexes, and that for the better Economy of the World; the Men, who were to be the Law-givers, had the larger share of Reason bestow’d upon them; by which means your Sex is the better prepar’d for the Compliance that is necessary for the performance of those Dudes which seem’d to be most properly assign’d to it.’13