NEW DELHI: The scandal surrounding the convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein has dominated headlines around the world since the US Department of Justice released millions of files on the case federal prosecutors were preparing when he died in custody in 2019. Nearly a decade after the #MeToo movement, the affair has rightly returned the spotlight to the still under-reported abuse of women by men who feel that their wealth and power allow them to act with impunity. All this underscores the need to strengthen the protection of women’s rights.
But as policymakers in other countries work to address gender inequality, conditions for women and girls in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan continue to deteriorate, systematically destroying half the population’s hopes and ambitions by prohibiting them from education and employment. Worse still, Taliban officials have been allowed to act with little international condemnation.
Since the group’s return to power in 2021, campaigners have hoped that Muslim-majority countries would be able to pressure or persuade Afghanistan’s Kandahar-based clerical rulers to change their position. After all, Islamic teaching in fact promotes girls’ education and women’s employment. But so far, those efforts have also failed.
The Taliban regime, no longer content with merely excluding girls and women from schools and workplaces, has ramped up its misogyny with efforts to erase women’s visibility from public life. The enactment in January of a new criminal procedure code heralds the loss of basic legal protections and further entrenchment of repression and discrimination against women and girls. It is for those reasons that many observers now talk of the Taliban’s crimes as equivalent to gender apartheid.
The new code fails to criminalise many forms of physical, psychological and sexual violence against women. For example, it treats domestic abuse as a crime only in narrow circumstances, such as when a man leaves wounds, bruising or other visible injuries on his wife. Even then, the maximum punishment appears to be a 15-day jail sentence. This reflects the code’s broader shift toward placing a heavy burden of proof on abused women. That is why much of the scant coverage of the new legal framework has described it as “legalising domestic violence.”