It has been a month since girls were banned from secondary schools in most of the Afghan country.
Afghanistan is the only country in the whole world to bar half its population from getting an education. Women, except for those in the public health sector, have also been restricted from returning to work. For women in this country, the only life they’ve known has come to a grinding halt.
“Now we just sit at home,” A seventeen-year-old Afghan girl said when her unlimited possibilities disappeared.
Before the Taliban took over, she used to prepare for school along with her brother each morning. Now, she faces the biggest rollback in human rights in recent times.
“I'm devastated. I’ve studied for eleven years, despite the risks. Even when things were so bad that we did not know if we’d get home alive from school...After everything that my father has been through, I am forced to stay home” the girl continued.
Not only have girls been denied an education, but their futures and relationships have also been compromised.
“I miss my classmates, my teachers, my books, everything. I wanted to be someone and do something with my life. But all of that is gone and I am left in the darkness.”
With this ban, the country’s situation worsens. Women are disappearing from the streets and public life. Fear in the country is increasing as the female future fills with uncertainties.
However, not all women are staying silent. Across Afghanistan, protests against the educational ban have risen. Women have risked their lives fighting for their education and rights.
During the month of September, there was a huge protest in Kabul, where the women were stopped and beaten. One of the protesters was lashed with electric cables. “A generation of women need to make sacrifices. We have to put ourselves in danger” the woman said. Until August, she supported her family of six. Now she is without a job.
For every single mother in Afghanistan, it is extremely painful and heartbreaking to see their children’s future turn so dark. Women have lost their independence, and without it, they must watch their hope and ambitions vanish.
The women’s affairs ministry is now non-existent under their actual government. It has been replaced by the ministry of vice and virtue, which used to be the most feared section of the Taliban regime.
Even little boys say that they want to see their female classmates come back, because, to them, the girls are their equals.
"In other countries, girls and women can do anything!" one of the boys told CBS News.
"They can work; they can study; they can do anything. Now, in Afghanistan now they cannot do anything!"
A journalist asked the government when girls would go back to schools, and when women would be allowed to work again. They answered, “Girls themselves are not going to school. We can't force them, we have not prevented them. We plan to open girls’ schools across the country.”
This response generated confusion because it contradicted their past statements. Previously, they had strongly supported the idea that women should not return to work or school right now because of the security situation.
Girls are part of the future of Afghanistan, but right now they have no place in it.
Bibliography
Afghanistan: Girls excluded as Afghan secondary schools reopen. [Photograph]. (2021, September 18). BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-58607816
Afghanistan: Girls Struggle for an Education. [Photograph]. (2021, October 17). https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/10/17/afghanistan-girls-struggle-education