Five Years On: Women’s Fight for Freedom in Afghanistan

Five Years On: Women’s Fight for Freedom in Afghanistan

For the past five years, the Taliban have launched an unprecedented attack on women and girls in Afghanistan in an effort to eliminate them from every aspect of public life, building on decades of efforts to restrict women’s rights. The regime has issued over 160 decrees undermining women’s access to education, employment, livelihoods, political participation, freedom of expression, freedom of association and assembly, access to healthcare, ability to move freely, and more. It has unleashed persistent and structural violence against women, including targeted arrests, physical and reputational attacks, killings, and repression. This state-led systematic attack on the human rights of over 20 million Afghans is so extreme that it amounts to gender apartheid. The country is now the worst country in the world to be a woman, according to the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security’s WPS Index. Yet Afghan women and girls – inside and outside of the country – continue to fight for their freedom, push back on repression, and express their dignity.

Join the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS) for this virtual event to commemorate five years of bravery and resistance. The event will share new findings from research conducted by GIWPS and DROPS Afghanistan, with insights from Afghan women and girls throughout the country, and will examine the situation of women and girls today in Afghanistan, the ways that they are standing up for their rights, and what the international community can do to help.