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One fateful weekend in March of 2024, the Taliban supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada announced on a media controlled by the group, that women in Afghanistan would now be stoned for adultery.
“We will flog the women … we will stone them to death in public [for adultery],” he said. “You may call it a violation of women’s rights … because they conflict with your democratic principles.” The statement went largely unnoticed, barely making a blimp in the international media landscape.
Since the Taliban took back power in 2021, they have steadily imposed restrictive rules on women, with each one more oppressive than the last. In the first few months of the takeover, as the country descended into chaos, social media was flooded with content of the crisis. Images of Afghans clinging to departing planes in a desperate attempt to flee went viral, while activists posted urgent warnings about what the regime’s return would mean for women.
That sense of urgency has since cooled down and the attention shifted. The conditions for women in the country, however, have continued to deteriorate on a daily basis.
What is happening in Afghanistan cannot be seen as an isolated case, unrelated to the feminist movement as a whole. This regression poses a threat to gender equality worldwide, especially in a global context where these rights are increasingly under threat. In 2024, UN Women warned that gender disparities are getting worse.
The deterioration of those rights in a country like Afghanistan, coupled with the rise of global far-right movements and a regression on reproductive rights in countries like the US and Poland paint a stark picture of how far we actually are from achieving gender equality.
Is the waning interest in the oppression of Afghan women rooted in a distorted stereotype that they have always been marginalized and so, in some ways, accustomed to it?
This skewed perception fosters complacency. When a group is portrayed as perpetually oppressed, their suffering almost becomes easier to ignore. It numbs global outrage and weakens international solidarity.
“The image that Afghanistan as a whole oppresses women in every aspect of life is not only incorrect but it is also a way of overlooking the courage and resilience of those women who have continued to fight for their rights despite facing the harshest conditions,” asserts exiled Afghan journalist Jawaher Yousofi.
Yousofi believes that the international reaction hasn’t been very powerful because “people around the world are used to hearing that Afghan women are weak women, are victims. But just because it’s [Afghanistan] dangerous, doesn’t mean they are weak.”
A few months into the Taliban’s return, women were instructed to stay indoors and refrain from going to work under the pretext that they would not be safe in the presence of Taliban soldiers. At the time, the group’s spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid claimed that this was a temporary measure, explaining that the fighters were not yet “trained” to respect women.
Directing women to stay home to avoid being disrespected by Taliban soldiers reflects the same flawed rhetoric as asking women to mind how they behave and how they dress in order to avoid being sexually assaulted. It follows an equivalent logic to placing the responsibility on the victim.
This echoes a long-standing global narrative of holding women responsible for preventing their own harassment by not dressing too revealing, not going out alone, not getting too drunk, not staying out too late – a whole series of “nots” placed on the assaulted rather than on the assailant.
This is the core of what activists have spent years fighting against: the idea that a woman’s safety depends on her compliance with a set of rules imposed by men, rather than on holding the aggressor accountable for his actions and addressing the root causes of gender-based violence.
When the new regime was put in place, the international community assumed the Taliban would have a less hardline agenda than they did during their first rule in 1996. They were mistaken.
“If the Taliban of the 1990s wielded violence openly, today’s Taliban try to cloak that violence in religious and cultural rhetoric,” says Yousofi. “But the outcome is the same: erasure, fear, and forced silence. Today’s Taliban are not only reclaiming the streets – they are targeting minds and futures.”
First, they came for their freedom of movement by prohibiting women from traveling for more than 72 km without a male companion (mahram) in December 2021, then they moved to imprison their minds by barring girls from attending schools in March 2022, followed by a university ban in December 2022, and a more recent restriction from pursuing a medical education. This is not an exhaustive list.
Early on, the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice instructed Afghan TV channels to stop airing dramas with women. The Taliban is flouting the progress, albeit small, made in recent years by gradually imposing draconian rules meant to completely erase women from public life.
In August 2024, the ministry issued a decree criminalizing women’s voices which they reasoned were “instruments of vice.” Under that law, women are no longer permitted to be heard in public. Women are being silenced, quite literally. This is not a euphemism.
One of the aforementioned laws set to have a devastating impact is the ban on women pursuing a medical education. In Afghanistan, women are only permitted to be treated by female medical professionals. With an already strained healthcare system and shortage of female staff, the law only exacerbates an already critical situation, jeopardizing future access and availability to quality healthcare for women in the country.
In 2020, Afghanistan ranked eighth in the world for maternal mortality rates. The alarming statistic highlights the already dire state of women’s health in the country.
“Where will the female health professionals of the future come from and who will attend to Afghan women when they are at their most vulnerable,” says Mickael Le Paih, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) country representative in Afghanistan. “For essential services to be available to all genders, they must be delivered by all genders.”
It is this international leniency with the policies applied in one country that ends up influencing legislations and attitudes towards women worldwide. Modern history is filled with similar instances.
In 2020, Poland‘s decision to tighten abortion laws sparked alarm among activists, who viewed it as a dangerous precedent that could have serious repercussions for the policies in neighboring countries.
In June 2022, the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade — which led to abortion bans in several states — emboldened other countries to adopt similarly restrictive abortion measures. According to intersectional feminist group, Fòs Feminista, newly introduced guidelines in Nigeria that would have permitted abortion under specific circumstances were rescinded shortly after the dismantling of Roe v. Wade.
The impact of this has reverberated far beyond the US borders. During his campaign in 2023, Javier Milei, Argentina’s president, pledged to hold a public vote for a potential abortion ban. In Italy that same year, pro-choice gynecologists faced pressure and difficulty in providing abortion care due to the rising anti-abortion sentiment.
These rules, regardless of where they’re set, shape global conversations that impact women worldwide. The Taliban’s gradual enforcement of stringent laws on Afghan women signals not only a regression for women’s rights in Afghanistan, but a broader threat to global gender equality. It sets a standard that could embolden other leaders and far-right movements.
The silence surrounding Afghanistan sends a bleak message: these rollbacks can occur without any real consequences to the perpetrators.
The Taliban’s framework, much like the US, has the potential to galvanize other regimes and misogynist ideologists, particularly because they’re getting away with it and facing little to no consequence.
“The lack of a serious and effective response from the international community to the Taliban’s actions has emboldened the group, making them feel they can impose increasingly restrictive laws on women without facing significant consequences,” explains Yousofi. “Especially after their return to power, while many countries and international organizations limited their reactions to critical statements, the Taliban faced virtually no real threat from the global community.”
The fact that any government at all can impose a ban on women’s voices being heard in public without pushback from global policymakers is an indicator of the state of the feminist movement. Until certain basic rights, the bare minimum, are granted to women in every corner of the world, the struggle continues for all of us. When one woman’s freedom is threatened in some part of the world, it is only a matter of time before it catches up to us.