Within Living Memory, part one (2021): How Afghan Women Lost Everything in Three Years

Content note: This post discusses violence against women and girls, forced marriage and suicide.

21 million women in Afghanistan have effectively been eradicated from public life. This is the most severe women’s rights crisis in the world [1], and it really is something the rest of the world needs to be paying attention to.

I was listening to a podcast at work the other day about the dire situation of women in Afghanistan. It was The Guardian’s Today in Focus, and the episode was called The 21 million women and girls the world forgot [2]. Obviously it’s something I’m aware of, and I know its recent history, but still, listening to those personal stories gave me the biggest chill. I’m a mother with a girl, and it just stopped me dead in my tracks. Sadly the plight of the women and girls over there has been somewhat overshadowed by other horrific global events, and I really felt the urge to think deeply about this and write about it.

I started trying to imagine what those conditions would mean, not only for women and girls in general, but for those who had known freedom before this and had it sharply ripped away, to the point where they are now pretty much treated as prisoners in their own country, and what UN experts call gender apartheid. It got me thinking about how countries fluctuate through positions and leaders, and the societies those leaders create, and how that relates to our society’s current trajectory here in the UK.

Women have lost everything in Afghanistan. They have no freedom, no identity, no dignity. Even basic human rights have been stripped away. They worked so hard and fought for so much more equality, and it literally disappeared overnight.

Unsurprisingly, huge and widespread depression and anxiety has ravaged through women and girls. Afghanistan is now one of the few countries in the world where more women than men die by suicide, and researchers monitoring it documented 195 cases of women and girls taking their own lives between April 2022 and February 2024 alone [3]. It’s no surprise, when women are mostly kept at home, cleaning, unable to leave the house or move freely through their villages or towns or enter any public building without a man chaperoning them. Can you even imagine not being able to go to the library, to a shop, to take your child to the playground, to visit a friend? Every facet of their mobility and freedom reduced.

And not only that, their education has been decimated too. They are completely banned from secondary school and universities [4], and any woman who had already worked really hard and gained a professional qualification has simply been stripped of it and forced into a domestic role in the home. The qualifications they worked so hard for are worth nothing now. Girls can still go to primary school up to grade six, which is about the year they turn 12, and that is when their education stops completely, forever [4]. Women who were previously in occupations such as midwifery are also now banned: in December 2024 midwifery and nursing courses were closed to women, which was the last route they had into any kind of medical career [4]. Giving birth is more unsafe than it’s ever been, and the UN estimates that leaving 1.1 million girls out of school and more than 100,000 women out of university raises the risk of maternal deaths by at least 50% [1]. Those women who had careers in the media, who were journalists and presenters, are in constant fear of arrest and torture, and just leaving the house, they say, feels like preparing to go into battle. Around 80% of female journalists in Afghanistan are now out of work, and any women lawyers or judges have been completely banned from working, full stop [5]. Poverty and the collapse of the economy have driven a surge in forced marriage, with girls as young as nine reported as being sold into marriage [6], and domestic abuse and violence against women and girls are virtually overlooked entirely.

I have to question how the rest of the world can simply turn a blind eye to this. There has been no other country in modern times that has dismantled the rights of half its population to the same extent [1]. Policies and laws have been changed to eradicate women from public life and to maintain constant power over them. Today nearly 80% of Afghan women aged 18 to 29 do nothing: they’re not in education or employment or training [1]. They are just sitting at home being a domestic servant to the men in their lives. If you look at both men and women, only one in four women is actually in paid employment or seeking work, whereas nearly 90% of men are either working or seeking it [1]. The ones that are still employed are mostly working in education or public health [5]. Pretty much everything else has gone. And the knock-on effect of girls only studying in primary school is that going forwards there will be fewer women able to work in education and public health, so the number employed will steadily decline and outcomes for women and girls will of course get worse. If women do manage to find any other work it tends to be low-paid and insecure, and often done from home. And even for those women that do manage to scrape an income, they find it very difficult to get hold of their own money, because less than 7% of Afghan women have a bank account [1]. The disparity is blinding across every statistic, and the regime doesn’t even try to pretend it isn’t happening.

The thing is that Afghan women had come so far. They were first given the right to vote in 1919, a year before women in the United States, under the reforms of King Amanullah Khan, who also banned child marriage and made head coverings optional [7]. He was forced to abdicate in 1929 and most of it was rolled back. It took until 1964 for the right to be written into the constitution and made real, and that constitution also gave women the right to stand for office, with Article 25 stating that all Afghans were equal before the law [8]. Not only that, women actually helped draft it. Two of the women who reviewed the draft went on to serve in government, and in the 1965 elections, the first in which Afghan women could vote or stand, four women were elected to the House of the People and two more were appointed to the Senate [8]. Kubra Noorzai was made Minister of Public Health in 1965, the country’s first female cabinet minister [8]. Women had experienced senior roles in the leadership of their country and were certainly progressing. Before the Taliban first took power in 1996, women made up 70% of Kabul’s school teachers, 40% of its doctors and 50% of its civilian government workers, and in Kabul half of the university students were women [9]. By 1977 women held more than 15% of the seats in Afghanistan’s parliament, which was more than the United States Congress managed twenty-five years later [9]. The more progressive image of Kabul in the 1970s does describe a small urban middle class rather than the whole country, however progress was being made, and you can see it in all the photos and stories from women who were living there at the time.

Afghanistan has never been anywhere near the top of any equality index, let’s face it, it’s no Sweden and it likely never will be. In fact the Global Gender Gap Report in 2021 ranked it 156th out of 156 countries [10]. That was the year the Taliban returned, and in 2022 and 2023 it kept its position as the lowest in the report [10]. And as if it couldn’t get any worse, in 2024 there wasn’t enough data to include it at all [10]. Another index, the Women, Peace and Security Index by the Georgetown Institute, has Afghanistan coming 181st out of 181 [11]. By contrast the UK, in the report that came out last month, came fifth out of 145 countries, having been fourth last year and fourteenth the year before that [12]. That's the second highest it's been, helped by having a more gender equal cabinet. Iceland has been top for a whopping 17 years running [12]. The report says it would take 120 years to get to full parity worldwide if we carry on at this rate, and for political power on its own it's 194 years [12]. The report also says progress on women in leadership has now stalled for the fourth year in a row, and that girls born today won’t see equal representation at top positions in their lifetimes [12]. I personally feel that, at the moment, there are some big backwards steps being made in a lot of countries across the world. The thing that doesn’t add up to me is that the UK on paper is one of the best places in the world to be a woman right now, and yet the party running almost level and just in second place in the polls has, as a main policy aim, repealing the law that helped get us there. Tell me how that makes sense?

In Afghanistan things took a massive and rapid downward turn in 2021. On the 15th of August the Taliban returned, and by September of the same year girls were banned from secondary school and professional women were told to stay at home [4]. There was a glimmer of hope in March 2022, when secondary schools were due to reopen, but the Taliban rescinded the order on the day and they remain shut [4]. By May 2022, only nine months after the Taliban took power, women were ordered to cover themselves from head to toe, with the burqa named as the preferred option, and the enforcement of this was put onto their male relatives [4]. By the time the 2024 law arrived it required a woman’s whole body and her face to be covered whenever she left the house, in clothing that isn’t thin, short or tight, and even in front of women who aren’t Muslim [4]. Afghanistan is a hot country, nothing like our climate here, and I can’t imagine what that is like to live in, day after day after day. By November 2022 women were banned from parks, gyms and public baths [4]. In December they were banned from all universities, starting the very next morning. There was no phasing it in, and the women already there weren't even allowed to finish their courses. Approximately 100,000 women were simply turned away at the gates on the 21st of December 2022 [4]. At the same time they were banned from working for NGOs, and in April 2023 that was extended to the UN [4]. Things continued to get even worse, and in July 2023 beauty salons were all closed and around a further 60,000 women lost their income [4]. A new law came into force on the 21st of August 2024 with 35 articles in it, and one of them made it illegal for a woman's voice to be heard in public by a man she isn't related to [4]. Effectively they were completely silenced. In December 2024 midwifery and nursing courses were also closed to women.

Three years. Just three years, from the day the Taliban walked back in to the day a woman’s voice in public became illegal. That’s all it took to go from relative freedom to being muted and erased, and by December 2024 the last route into medicine had gone too.

I’m not sure if you’ve heard of the term the Overton window? Basically it’s the range of things a politician can say without it ending their career, and the fact that this window can move. The range can get wider or narrower, so something that couldn’t have been said ten years ago could now be deemed as ordinary. A couple of examples would be working from home: before Covid this wasn’t widespread, it was seen really as a luxury or a perk for freelancers, and requesting it was considered pretty radical or unacceptable. However the Covid pandemic created a massive shift, and now remote or hybrid working is entirely mainstream. In fact companies that require employees to be in the office five days a week often find it harder to recruit, because working from home is seen as a pretty standard and sensible choice. That’s a great example of the Overton window. Others include online dating: in the 90s and noughties, meeting a partner on a dating website carried a bit of a social stigma, but these days it’s the most popular way to meet.

Politically, our Overton window in the UK has already moved. The party that is now second in the polls, with a fighting chance of actually running the country in the short-term future, has promised to scrap the Equality Act [13]. This is not something that would have even been entertained ten years ago. So far three senior Conservatives have joined Reform in the last year, and now a new party, Restore, only registered seven months ago, has a 113-page plan to remove up to two million people in under three years, and also wants to repeal the Equality Act [14]. The National Police Chiefs’ Council have called violence against women and girls a national emergency, and their statistics say that one woman in twelve is a victim every year [15]. Studies show that sexism now also predicts the far-right vote amongst young men [16], and at least four in ten under-13s have a social media profile [17]. So much has changed that our Overton window has shifted far to the right, and women and girls are the ones losing out.

If we look at what’s happened in America, it’s clear they’re already slipping, quicker than us. Roe v Wade was overturned in June 2022 [18], and since then more women have been hurt and more have died. Amber Thurman in Georgia died of sepsis after the hospital she attended delayed her D&C procedure for more than 20 hours. When this was reviewed the state called it preventable, but the doctors were too scared to act in time [19]. Candi Miller of Georgia died at home. She was too afraid to seek care [19]. Josseli Barnica in Texas died after waiting 40 hours for miscarriage care [19]. Nevaeh Crain from Texas, aged only 18, died of an infection after doctors again delayed her treatment [19]. And the statistics back this up, it’s not purely anecdotal. ProPublica found this year that deaths from ectopic pregnancy have nearly doubled across the country, and in Texas 310 more women had major blood loss from an ectopic pregnancy in 2023 and 2024 than in the period before, which is a rise of 29% [20]. In Texas the maternal mortality rate has gone up 56% from 2019 to 2022, compared to 11% nationally [21]. And after the reporting on those deaths, Georgia decided to dismiss its entire maternal mortality committee [19]. How is this in any way beneficial to women and girls?

If what can happen in Afghanistan can happen in three years, it can absolutely happen anywhere. America is already demonstrating that big changes can happen quickly, and the UK isn’t that far behind it.

I went through secondary school in the late 80s and early 90s and it really felt like we were a pioneering generation of women and girls, with a freedom and an equality like never before. We were starting to get into the boardroom in the 1990s and really progressing. When I look now at the policies of parties like Reform and Restore, and not just them, the patriarchy overall, I feel like we’ve taken a massive step backwards. The stable countries that were once around us are now falling, and it feels like it’s only a matter of time before we follow the same path.

After listening to the podcast, and thinking about the process, it made me wonder what could happen in a perfect storm of inequality. I’m going to continue the UK story and imagine what may happen going forward, using only scenarios that have either already happened in this country, been promised that they will happen, or been done in other countries. This will be a fictional prediction, it isn’t a forecast, but it’s a story of what might happen if we don’t continue to fight for our rights. The only thing I’m inventing is the order in which it happens, and the dates. If you’d like to read it, please sign up to my newsletter and follow me on social media, where I’ll be releasing it in parts over the coming weeks.

The Receipts // (Sources)

[1] UN Women, Afghanistan: Ten facts about the world’s most severe women’s rights crisis, August 2025. UN Women, FAQs: What it’s like to be a woman in Afghanistan today, 2026. UN Women and UNDP, Afghanistan Gender Index, June 2025.

[2] The Guardian, Today in Focus, The 21 million women and girls the world forgot.

[3] Afghan Witness, Centre for Information Resilience, Surge in female suicides linked to forced marriages, Taliban violence, and arrests, 2025.

[4] UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan and Human Rights Watch, August 2021 to December 2024. Law on the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, 21st August 2024.

[5] International Crisis Group, A Precarious Lifeline? Women-led Business in Afghanistan, January 2026. EU Agency for Asylum, Afghanistan country report, 2025. Reporters Without Borders, 20 December 2021.

[6] UN Women, Afghanistan gender alerts, 2022 to 2025.

[7] United Nations, Unveiled: A History of Afghan Women’s Rights, UN Photo.

[8] Constitution of Afghanistan, 1964. Afghan parliamentary election records, 1965.

[9] United States Congressional Record, 5 November 2001. US Department of State, Situation of Women and Children in Afghanistan, 2001.

[10] World Economic Forum, Global Gender Gap Report, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.

[11] Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, Women, Peace and Security Index 2025/26.

[12] World Economic Forum, Global Gender Gap Report 2026, 16th September 2026.

[13] Suella Braverman, Reform UK, 17 February 2026.

[14] Restore Britain, Mass Deportations: Legitimacy, Legality and Logistics, February 2026.

[15] National Police Chiefs’ Council, Violence Against Women and Girls: National Policing Statement, July 2024.

[16] From frustration to radicalization, Political Research Exchange, 2026.

[17] Ofcom, Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes, 2025.

[18] Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, US Supreme Court, 24 June 2022.

[19] ProPublica, Life of the Mother, 2024 to 2026.

[20] ProPublica, analysis of ectopic pregnancy outcomes in Texas, 2026.

[21] Gender Equity Policy Institute, September 2024.