CHAPTER 21

• Jurisdiction: United States

CHAPTER 21

Afghan Woman and #MeToo: A Story of Struggle and Strength

Zulaikha Aziz¹ and Nasrina Bargzie²

Afghan Path

In 2017, a group of teenage Afghan girls took the robotics world by storm. An all-girls team from Herat, Afghanistan, in the shadow of war, travel difficulties, and family heartbreaks, went toe-to-toe with teams across the world and took first place in a top robotics competition in Europe.³ Their challenge was to create a robot that could solve a real-world problem.⁴ The girls created a robot that uses solar power to assist with fieldwork on farms.⁵ Thousands of spectators who attended the event chose the girls' team as the winner.⁶ Despite all the challenges, these Afghan girls rose and won. This is the story of Afghanistan and of Afghan women.

Afghanistan has endured nearly forty years of armed conflict, and yet in a 2018 Survey of the Afghan People by the Asia Foundation, 80.8 percent of Afghan female and male respondents reported that they were happy.⁷ As Afghan women and the Afghan people face challenge after challenge, both the prevalence of harassment of women exposed by the global phenomena of movements like #MeToo, and the day-to-day challenges of living in a war zone, the resilience and strength of Afghan women amid these realities cannot be understated.

The challenges and harsh realities are many. Violence against women is one of the biggest issues facing not only Afghan women but Afghanistan in general. The severe gender inequality in Afghanistan is directly related to lower health outcomes, lower educational outcome, and lower income inequality overall.⁸ We offer a sober assessment of these realities in the pages that follow, but every difficulty is counter-balanced by the sheer will of Afghan women and Afghan people to survive and flourish as independent, free people.

Real Life: Afghanistan

Women across the world are speaking up about their most painful experiences through the #MeToo movement in an effort to further social progress in women's daily lives. Afghan women, too, are part of this movement. Like their sisters across the world, Afghan women have suffered under historic and current-day gender-specific hostilities. Some issues are cross-cutting—abuse of female athletes, street and internet harassment, laws that provide insufficient protection or are not implemented properly. Others are specific to the history and context of Afghanistan—security in war, and patriarchy systems still evolving in the modern context.

Since the removal of the Taliban regime in 2001, women have made substantial legal gains—women's rights were enshrined in the national Constitution of 2004, and successive national governments have vowed to protect women's rights, eliminate violence against women, and support women's economic empowerment and political participation. In fact, one of the cornerstones of the international community's intervention in Afghanistan was the so-called liberation of Afghan women.⁹ The military occupation was coupled with billions of dollars in humanitarian and development aid, of which a substantial portion was explicitly conditioned on implementing projects containing a "gender equality" or "women's empowerment" component.¹⁰ Even with all of the rhetoric, reports by the United Nations, local civil society groups, and international human rights organizations have shown that violence against women remains largely unaddressed by the Afghan criminal justice system.¹¹ After nearly two decades of democratic governance after the fall of the Taliban, which kept Afghan women effectively out of Afghan society,¹² the Taliban legacy continues to loom over legal and social progress made by Afghans.¹³ In 2018, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, 56 percent of the country is under Afghan government (referred to as the National Unity Government (NUG)) control, 30 percent is contested, and 14 percent is under the control of insurgent groups.¹⁴ The latest reports of peace talks between the United States and the Taliban to potentially bring the Taliban into a power-sharing agreement with the current Afghan government have Afghan women in fear of the further erosion of their existing rights.¹⁵

As Afghan women and girls take up the mantle of inclusion in the global community through academics, sports, working outside the home, and leading their families, the same ills that plague other countries also plague Afghanistan. Without a doubt, sexual harassment of women is widespread in Afghanistan. From public places to educational environments to the workplace, studies show that upward of 90 percent of Afghan women report harassment.¹⁶ Underlying themes that contribute to extreme levels of harassment include the willingness of men to harass, the lack of public intervention when harassment occurs, victim-blaming, and distrust of police and institutions.¹⁷

Street harassment is a daily experience for Afghan women,¹⁸ including sexual comments and physical attacks, such as groping, pinching, and slapping. Anti-harassment advocates often end up being the subject of harassment themselves.¹⁹ For example, in 2015, an activist walked outside for eight minutes wearing steel armor to protest the groping and leering she endured daily. The activist received so many threats she was forced to leave Afghanistan.²⁰

Harassment of women in public institutions is also a problem area. Like the abuse of female gymnasts in the United States,²¹ explosive allegations of sexual and physical abuse of players on the Afghan women's national soccer team rocked Afghanistan in late 2018.²² A former player has alleged that the president of the Afghanistan Football Federation and some trainers "are raping and sexually harassing female players."²³ The response of the NUG was strong and unequivocal. President Ashraf Ghani ordered an investigation and noted that the allegations were "shocking to all Afghans."²⁴

The internet has also proven to be a source and space of harassment of Afghan women.²⁵ Facebook is widely used in Afghanistan and has become a source of harassment where women have received rape threats and extortion threats.²⁶

Harassment in the workplace is also rampant, with studies suggesting that up to 90 percent of Afghan women have experienced such harassment. ²⁷ In 2017, a video of an Afghan colonel having sexual intercourse with a woman he pressured after she had asked for a promotion went viral.²⁸ While the colonel was detained and placed under investigation, no formal charges appear to have been brought yet.²⁹ Other Afghan women have reported that to get grants from United Nations agencies and various Western embassies, they have been told by Afghan staff that their proposals would be approved in exchange for sexual favors.³⁰

Violence against women—including "murders, beatings, mutilation, and acid attacks"—remain prevalent, with the Ministry of Women's Affairs reporting an increase in violence against women in areas under effectively-Taliban control.³¹ Afghan women continue to lag behind men in literacy, with literacy of young women being only 57 percent of young men.³² Further, child marriage continues as a widespread issue limiting the opportunities of women.³³

The #MeToo movement itself has taken a shape formed by the realities of Afghanistan. While a few Afghan women have spoken out, most Afghan women remain silent in the face of this speak-out movement.³⁴ One activist who has spoken out noted that "[i]n Afghanistan, women can't say they faced sexual harassment. If a woman shares someone's identity, he will kill her or her family. We can never accuse men, especially high-ranking men, without great risk."³⁵ Threats come not only from the accused, but also from the victim's families, and society at large.³⁶

Afghan activists blame impunity for perpetrators as a key reason that Afghan women do not report harassment or get relief.³⁷ Activists push back on the argument that misogyny derived from culture and sexual repression is what drives harassment of Afghan women and point out that harassment of women is prevalent in countries with differing cultural backgrounds and that harassment of women is a global problem.³⁸ That said, because Afghan laws and policies are not appropriately implemented and are rife with politicking, the reality is that Afghan women often remain unprotected in public and private spaces.³⁹

The current government is publicly committed to supporting women's empowerment and addressing violence against Afghan women.⁴⁰ NUG's adopted National Action Plan includes adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, addressing the effects of war on women.⁴¹ The international donor and development community, which often drives the inclusion of women's rights issues, is highly involved in attempting to bring NUG's goals into effect and with "two-thirds of the population under the age of 24, Afghanistan's youth culture is thriving in major urban areas, and women are increasingly seen in the arts and media, including bold female street artists, painters and musicians."⁴² Strident advocacy of Afghan women's rights leaders has led to the passage of a number of laws directly addressing harassment and violence against women. All these efforts are part of a work very much in progress, and an important part of moving the rights of Afghan women forward.

Women's Rights and the Legal System of Afghanistan

Access to justice remains an enormous problem for Afghan women generally, and more particularly in the context of demanding their right to be free from violence, including harassment.⁴³ Illustrating the on-the-ground reality for Afghan women and the shortcomings of the Afghan legal system to adequately address violence against women is the excruciatingly tragic story of Farkhunda Malikzada, a twenty-seven-year-old woman beaten to death by a mob in the center of Kabul on March 19, 2015.⁴⁴

The murder happened in the center of a city near a religious site, among police...