One year of Taliban rule: Know how women's rights have changed in Afghanistan

It has been one full year since the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan by overthrowing the government through an invasion. After the Taliban formed its own government in the country, many new rules were enforced in the country, many of them targeting the rights of women.

The Taliban government completed one full year of legitimacy in August 2022. The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan saw a lot of displacement and poverty for the people of the country, with many of them trying to flee to neighbouring countries to protect their families from the Islamist militant group.

As the Taliban celebrated the anniversary of its takeover of Afghanistan, almost all women and girls in the country are suffering since most of their basic rights have been trampled by the new regime. The fundamentalist group has put in force a lot of rules that step into the human rights of women and young girls, including new education and clothing guidelines for them.

One of the most rigorous rules imposed by the Taliban – which was internationally condemned – was the new clothing guidelines, where Afghani women were urged to abide by the “head-to-toe” covered rule in the country, meaning that they need to keep their entire body covered while they are in public.

Another rule which sparked a lot of criticism and protests from the women of Afghanistan was the segregation of genders in schools and educational institutes, where male and female classmates were made to sit in different classrooms, limiting their interaction with each other.

The new rules by the Taliban state that apart from the current academic batch, women will be urged to stop pursuing higher education. This rule makes it so that the highest level of education for women will be the sixth grade.

Further, the Taliban also stepped on the rights of women to travel without a man by barring them from getting a driver’s license in the country. The number of female employees in government offices has also diminished over the past year.

Taliban has implemented a rule that all women who are going out to public places should have a male “guardian” with them for supervision and protection. Earlier, the Taliban had also urged women not to venture out of their homes at all, since their army was not “trained to respect women.”

After capturing Kabul in August last year, Taliban authorities have imposed severe restrictions on women’s and girls’ rights, suppressed the media, and arbitrarily detained, tortured, and summarily executed critics and perceived opponents, among other abuses.

Though the United Nations and several national leaders have often spoken out against the abuse of rights in Afghanistan under the Taliban rule, it is not known if the government has plans to reverse any of these rules. 

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