Institute for War & Peace Reporting (UK): Afghan officials have hit back at a UN report that criticised their government for allowing mediation to replace formal justice proceedings in cases of violence against women. Rights activists, however, argue that the study highlights key problems with the legal approach to gender abuse. Click here to read more
CBC: Shakila Zareen praises Canada for accepting her as a refugee after the U.S. turned its back – Zareen was 17 years old when she said her brother-in-law forced her to marry a man many years older. She said the abuse started on her wedding night and continued for months. “From right then and there, he began
Human Rights Watch: More than 8 out of 10 Afghan women and girls will suffer domestic and other violence in their lifetime. Before 2001, they had nowhere to run. These days there are some safe havens: the country’s tiny, but desperately important, network of women’s shelters. But these shelters are now under attack – and not for the
UNAMA: One in every three women around the world has experienced physical or sexual violence. Gender-based violence is a global issue, affecting millions each year, particularly the most vulnerable, including Afghan women and girls. It is now widely recognized that violence against women, including harassment and harmful practices, is major barrier to women and girls enjoying
Reuters: Fatima’s Taliban husband was so controlling that he refused to allow her to bathe and threatened to burn her face if she dared wear makeup, suspicious that his 12-year-old Afghan wife was trying to make herself attractive to other men. Click here to read more (external link).
The New York Times: Mumtaz is a 23-year-old woman from the northern Afghan province of Kunduz, the victim of an acid attack when she was 18, whose tormentors were jailed. It was a rare legal victory in the struggle for women’s rights in Afghanistan, hailed at the time as proof that justice for female victims was possible.
The Guardian (UK): Shakila Zareen’s asylum application was initially approved after her husband shot her, but it was later denied under Donald Trump’s new US migration policies. When Shakila Zareen learned that her husband planned to kill her, she fled to her mother’s house. A few hours later, she was alone in the living room when her
The New York Times: If Afghanistan is one of the worst places to be a woman, then Ghor, a province so lawless that people often wonder if there is a government there at all, may be the country’s capital of gender-based violence and abuse. Week after week there are reports of women abused or killed in
IWPR: Campaigners are calling for the Afghan government to follow through on promises to change parts of Afghanistan’s penal code that they argue actually serves to legimitise violence against women. Article 398 of the Afghan penal code states that a man who sees “his wife or other family members” in a compromising position and kills or
AFP: Afghan ministries on Thursday signed an agreement to eliminate violence against women, a largely symbolic effort in a country that foreign observers still consider one of the worst in the world to be female. The Afghan attorney general’s office recorded more than 3,700 cases of violence against women in the first eight months of 2016,