Rashmi Dangol (15 December 2019)
I remember reading somewhere that women in Afghanistan have always been very brave. As I was reading this, I remembered the story one of my colleagues told me about his grandmother, who was able to display her leadership in a village at the very young age and play a crucial role in decision-making.
However, despite several such instances, we should also acknowledge that the large proportion of women population in Afghanistan become victims of different traditions on a daily basis. The history of Afghanistan has been dominated by the narrations developed by powerful men. And especially during the T regime (1996-2001), things had worsened. The situation has got relatively better after 2001 and subsequently women participation in the public sphere has increased considerably. However, different surveys and studies conducted during 2017 and 2018 suggest that “an estimated two-thirds of Afghan girls do not attend school. Eighty-seven percent of Afghan women are illiterate, while 70-80 percent face forced marriage, many before the age of 16.”
Women in Afghanistan, like elsewhere, have been struggling to protect their rights and be recognized as equal citizens of this country. If we reflect back on the history of women’s struggle throughout the world, we would see how these battles (for the protection of their rights) had turned into different waves of feminism.
The first wave of feminism was about the suffrage right of women, while the second wave focused on domestic violence, inequality, sexuality, family and workplace. The third wave talked about intersectionality, wherein they highlighted how women had to go through multilayers of discrimination based on their class, caste, gender, etc. It brought women from different race and ethnicity in the mainstream of feminism. It also critiqued women stereotypes and commodification.
The fourth wave, which is the most recent one, brought out the issues of street and workplace harassment. The most recent examples of the fourth wave are three consecutive years of women’s march: with a slogan of “I am not alone” in January 2017 against Trump; with a theme “Power to the Polls” in January 2018; and “Women’s Wave” in January 2019.
The movement was (also) fueled by the ongoing #MeToo campaign that began in October 2017. The New York Times wrote, “[A] deluge of revelations about powerful men abusing women, leading to the #MeToo moment, has pushed activists to demand deeper social and political change.” This movement brought a large number of women from all across the globe together through social media where they spoke about sexual and other kinds of harassment they had gone through in their lives.
In Afghanistan, amidst the #MeToo movement, Maryam Mehtar, a young journalist from Kabul tweeted in October 2017 about the sexual harassment she had gone through as a child. Similarly, Khalida Popal, former captain of Afghanistan’s women’s national football team opened up about the verbal and sexual harassment on the members of the Afghanistan national women’s team by the representative of the Afghanistan Football Federation.
In 2019, some other cases of sexual harassment came into limelight when a few women stepped up to speak about the harassment they had gone through at the highest levels of government offices, including at Arg (the Presidential Palace). Many other reports that followed asked questions such as, why #MeToo has not gone far enough and had as much impact in Afghanistan or why it has failed in Afghanistan.
Maya Oppenheim, Women’s Correspondent at The Independent, reflected on the survey conducted in Afghanistan (and Nigeria). According to the survey findings, none of the 8,500 women from both countries (who were part of this survey) had heard anything about the #MeToo movement.
In Afghanistan where 54.5% of the population live under the national poverty line with only 17.6% of the population having access to internet, this finding might not be as shocking. The #MeToo movement was initiated on social media and other online platforms, thus if someone does not own a smart phone, lack internet facility and cannot read and write, it is not difficult to assume that they lack access to many events/movements occurring around them.
Apart from this, many women from the urban area with an access to these facilities also did not seem comfortable to come out and share about the harassment they went through or were going through because these women grew up in a conservative society where women are not promoted or expected to speak about such issues, either in private or public due to the fear of social stigma, humiliation and protection of family’s honor.
One of the research reports on sexual harassment against women in Afghanistan published in 2015/16 concluded that out of 346 women and girls interviewed, “[a]bsolute majority (90%) of the respondents” had “witnessed of sexual harassment cases in public places; 79% in educational organizations and 72% in workplaces.” The question continues, with so many cases of harassment, why are women still silent? As mentioned above, different studies conducted on this issue in Afghanistan show that the majority of women who face sexual harassments do not open up because of fear, stigma and shame.
While the effect of #MeToo movement in Afghanistan continues to be questioned, Farahnaz Forotan, a journalist, began another initiative called #MyRedLine campaign on social media in early 2019. The initiative began amidst peace talks with T. It later became collective voice of many women (and men), which emphasized among various other concerns that women’s freedom in Afghanistan should not be endangered if T returns to share power. Since then, many more from Afghanistan (and other countries) have taken part in this campaign to show their support.
There are number of women like Forotan, including some prominent figures, and human and women’s rights activists such as Fawzia Koofi, Jamila Afghani, Shahrzad Akbar, Rula Ghani, etc. who have been raising their concerns about the peace negotiations with T and safeguarding of the basic human and women’s rights. They have been openly discussing about the importance of women’s participation in politics and other public spheres, and their rights to education and equal opportunities.
Some women activists have also been actively participating in public debates and talking about the need for positive changes in the lives of women in Afghanistan over a few decades. Their struggles have brought out some hopeful results such as increment of girls’ enrollment in schools and colleges over last few years and recent bill passed in the parliament that makes the cut-off age for being declared legally major at eighteen years. But given the limited rights and freedom, backlashes from different conservative groups, and existence of strong patriarchic hold in a society, women in Afghanistan will have to overcome many strenuous challenges to secure their rights as equal citizens in Afghanistan.
Women’s movements and campaigns (in Afghanistan and other parts of the world) display that women’s voices have been suppressed and marginalized for centuries through politics, and in the name of culture, tradition, and religion. In addition, even technologies (such as television), invented to make people’s life easier, are being used to brainwash the public and maintain the stereotypes and suppression of women.
With the amalgamation of popular culture and the system of capitalism, it has been converted into tool to objectify women and promote gender stereotypes by using means such as, TV serials, ads, music videos, films, etc. And not very surprisingly, it has also been a platform for political and public figures who promote such objectification and suppression, such as Donald Trump (who is constantly accused of assaulting/harassing women).
In the context of Afghanistan, one of the recent examples of public harassment in an attempt to repress women’s voice is the incident of public lynching of Farkhunda in Kabul on March 19, 2015 by the mob.
And if we enter the private sphere, women’s voices are yet again suppressed through different social cultural norms, religious beliefs, patriarchal system and discriminative laws and policies. Women are, at the same time, taught to be quiet, to endure whatever comes by in silence. They are told they have been given the quality of patience by God unlike the other gender, who thus cannot control their anger. These lead women to bear a lot of social and emotional trauma in silence.
People, who believe that patriarchy is the ideal system and call women voiceless or someone born to be a shadow need to understand that women are not voiceless. Calling them voiceless would be disqualifying their agency to speak for themselves and sidelining their voice in an attempt to taking their agency away from them. The examples of women movements/campaigns provided above show that every woman can become agent and speak for themselves. However, the complex systems in Afghanistan do not entertain these voices.
These status quoists should understand that the feminism is not about sideling one gender to provide authority to the other. These fights are for the women who have endured their sufferings in silence for centuries and are attempting to break these silence for securing equality and equity in their society. Such incidents should not scare the women fighting for their own rights to gain the same social, economic and political status in their country.
Rashmi Dangol (A.K.A. Rashmi Sheila) is Program Manager at Afghanistan Center at Kabul University (ACKU) and a freelance writer. Views expressed in this article are her own.
