Hell on earth for Afghan women: From the ban on education to the legal rape of girls

Since May 14, it has been legal for an adult man to rape a girl in Afghanistan. On that day, the Taliban enacted Decree No. 18, or the “Code on Judicial Separation of Spouses,” a regulation that legalizes child marriage without even requiring a performance of supposed consent from the girl; her silence is enough.

What the decree effectively sanctions is “that girls can be married off at six or seven years old — or younger — under the pretext that they can theoretically request a divorce once they turn nine,” provided they are still virgins and dare to confront an adult husband and Taliban judges, explains Afghan activist Zubaida Akbar. The age of nine is when the Taliban’s strict Hanafi Islamic jurisprudence arbitrarily places the onset of female puberty.

The normalization of pedophilia is not the only provision in this new law that tightens even further the cage in which the Taliban have confined women and girls since their return to power on August 15, 2021. Akbar, director of the Afghanistan program at the organization Femena, explains from the United States that the decree reduces to almost nothing the chances that an Afghan woman can obtain a divorce. It also prevents a woman from requesting that her husband be declared dead — even if he has been missing for decades — “until all of the man’s contemporaries have died.”

Decree No. 18 is a “particularly devastating” law, the activist laments. It is also just one more misogynistic measure, she adds. In their nearly five years in power, the Taliban have enacted around 140 rules, decrees, or simple orders restricting women’s freedoms. Femena had already counted 134 of them last summer. These measures form the pillars of what Akbar calls “a hell on earth,” an abyss that grows deeper by the day while, at the same time, the international community takes steps toward legitimizing the fundamentalists as Afghanistan’s rulers.

In 2025, Russia became the first state to officially recognize the Taliban government. On the same day the decree legalizing child marriage in the country was enacted — May 14 — it emerged that the European Union had invited a Taliban delegation to Brussels in June to discuss new avenues for deporting Afghans (including Afghan women), at the request of some 20 member states, among which Spain is not included.

“A red carpet that this Europe, which presents itself as a defender of human rights, is rolling out for the Taliban, granting them legitimacy,” says Afghan journalist Khadija Amin, now living in exile in Spain.

Pretexts

One of the Taliban’s first decisions upon returning to power was to suspend the Constitution, which, among other safeguards, set a minimum marriage age of 16. That law was often not respected, recalls Rachel Reid of the Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN) from London, but at least it existed — along with “female judges, prosecutors, lawyers, and shelters for victims,” the analyst notes.

The so‑called “Taliban 2.0” — a label used since 2020 by the United States, in part to justify the abrupt withdrawal of its troops — were not much more moderate than those who ruled the country between 1996 and 2001. They were, however, more calculating; more aware that pariah status was not in their interest, and seemingly intent on testing how the international community would react. Perhaps for that reason, at first the fundamentalists proceeded cautiously. With pretexts.

For example, in September 2021, when they closed girls’ secondary schools and claimed it was a “temporary” measure while they ensured gender segregation in education — something that already existed. By then, they had already urged Afghan women not to go to work, using the excuse that their fighters were not accustomed to interacting with women.

First they banned secondary school. Then, in December 2022, university — making Afghanistan the only country in the world where girls are barred from studying from the age of 12 onward. Since then, the Taliban have shut down every alternative Afghan women sought to continue their education, such as private language academies or vocational schools run by humanitarian organizations. The fundamentalists pursue clandestine schools with particular ferocity — schools that some girls continue to attend at great personal risk. To Rachel Reid, this demonstrates their “courage, tenacity, and desire to learn.”

In nearly five years of Taliban rule, 80% of Afghan women have been expelled from the labor market, according to a U.N. Women report. Afghan women are banned from working in the administration, security forces, banks, NGOs and United Nations humanitarian agencies. They cannot serve as prosecutors, judges or members of parliament and are not even allowed to run beauty salons, which the Taliban closed in July 2023, depriving them of one of the few places where they could still earn a living and socialize.

The few women who still have a job are required to be accompanied to and from work by a male relative — a mahram or guardian: father, husband or brother. If a woman forgoes or does not have that guardian and dares venture into the street alone, she can be imprisoned and tortured. Afghan women also cannot obtain a passport, go to a hospital or travel without that guardian at their side.

Leisure activities are likewise forbidden. The general ban on listening to music comes on top of the ban on entering parks, gardens, gyms, public baths, restaurants and cafés. Women are banned from playing sports and driving, and even merely being alone in the street without a defined purpose is considered “loitering,” even though most of the beggars now seen on Afghan city streets are women and children — a situation directly linked to the ban on work.

Boarded‑up windows

In 2024, the Taliban took another step in their effort to turn Afghan women into shadows by approving a morality law that forbids them from showing their faces, looking at men, or speaking in public — treating their voices as something that must be concealed like genitalia. Even before that, they had already forced women to cover themselves from head to toe — though the burqa is not yet mandatory — and banned perfume, high heels, and brightly colored clothing. Afghan women cannot even look out a window. The fundamentalists have ordered every opening that might allow them to be seen from the street or neighboring homes to be bricked up.

More serious still is that Afghan women cannot be treated by male doctors, not even in life‑threatening situations, at a time when the country suffers from a severe shortage of female health workers — a shortage that will only worsen. In December 2024, the Taliban eliminated the exception that had allowed Afghan women to study medicine, nursing, or train as midwives. That decision amounts to a delayed death sentence for many women in the country.

That long list of measures to curtail the rights of women and girls demonstrates, Reid says, “the systemic nature of discrimination that affects all aspects of Afghan women’s lives” — what the United Nations defines as a “gender apartheid” against which Afghan women, progressively forgotten by the international community, continue to protest. Amnesty International has documented dozens of cases of demonstrators subjected to enforced disappearance, imprisonment, beatings, electric shocks and all kinds of torture.

Misery

So far the most decisive international action against the Taliban has come from the International Criminal Court (ICC), which last year issued arrest warrants for Hibatullah Akhundzada, the supreme leader of Afghanistan, and Abdul Hakim Haqqani, president of the Afghan Supreme Court. Several senior officials in the fundamentalist government also face financial sanctions and travel bans from the Security Council and various countries. However, in 2024 the U.N. executive body temporarily lifted those sanctions so that four Taliban leaders could make the pilgrimage to Mecca. Before that, they had traveled to the United Arab Emirates without interference.

The misery in which Afghans live has also become a bargaining chip in the hands of the fundamentalists. Nearly 23 million of the country’s roughly 44 million people required humanitarian assistance in 2025. Faced with the dilemma of abandoning these people or cooperating with the Taliban, the international community has largely opted for the latter. Afghanistan is not under a trade embargo, and the country continues to receive humanitarian aid — aid that the Taliban partly control. Nearly five years after their return to power, the international response to each new assault on the rights of Afghan women and girls is now often limited to empty statements of condemnation.

Amid that impunity, the Taliban accelerated in 2024 the legal codification of their “gender apartheid” by incorporating more than a hundred edicts against women into the morality law, thereby giving them the force of law. This past January, the legal architecture of oppression was strengthened even further when the fundamentalists enacted a statute that functions as a Penal Code and legalizes gender‑based violence.

The law not only allows a husband to “discipline” his wife — or rape her — whenever he sees fit, while prohibiting the wife from even seeking refuge in her family’s home. It equates women to property worth less than a camel or a dog. The law sets a prison sentence of only 15 days for a man who causes “a fracture, an open wound, or a bruise” to his wife — and only if the woman manages to prove it before a judge to whom she cannot show even a centimeter of skin. The penalty for organizing a dogfight can be up to five months in prison.

This code exposes Afghan women to violence from literally anyone. The text states that any Muslim “who witnesses what is considered a ‘sin’ is authorized to impose corrective punishment on the spot to ‘prevent vice’” or prohibited acts — when Afghan women are already forbidden from doing almost anything. Except “breathing, which is not the same as living,” as one woman says in a Femena report.

“It is not surprising,” reflects Zubaida Akbar, “that there is not a day without news of Afghan women’s suicides or femicides carried out for the most trivial reasons.”

“The entire Taliban system offers impunity and legalizes violence against women, who can be beaten, imprisoned and humiliated by the Taliban, by fathers, husbands or brothers, or by random passersby,” the activist says. If you kill a woman, “nothing happens.” And “it’s not only about erasing Afghan women from the workforce and the public sphere, as has been said,” the Femena activist stresses, but about “eliminating them physically.”

Sold

Karishma, 24, was a computer science student whose graduation was derailed by the university closures. Now, she says from an undisclosed location in Afghanistan, she survives more than she lives—“with no plans and no future.”

Unable to study or work, many families are giving their daughters in marriage because they think “at least they will be safe,” the young woman explains. She then sends a photo of another girl. Her name was Fajunda, and she was 17. In the picture, the teenager smiles with one hand over her heart.

Last August, Karishma recalls, Fajunda’s husband “killed her near Kabul’s Gulbahar market a month and a half after they married.”

Karishma then recounts the case of a six-year-old girl who was married to a 45-year-old man in Helmand, in the country’s southwest. An Afghan girl is now “the most defenseless human being conceivable,” Rachel Reid laments.

She is also merchandise. Karishma knows several cases of fathers who, mired in misery, have sold their daughters to adult men. What shocks her is that this trade — which condemns girls to sexual violence, “early pregnancies that endanger their lives,” and a life shut pushed into the shadows — sometimes involves “very small amounts of money.” UNICEF has documented cases where the payment was less than €2,000 ($2,300). International NGOs estimate that child marriage has increased by 500% in Afghanistan in the nearly five years of Taliban rule.

Some Afghan women flee, but most have no way out. This newspaper wrote to Zahra, a Kabul woman who taught English to other young women online. A man answered instead. Zahra now lives and studies in Bangladesh.

Leila Bassim opened the last women’s bookstore in Kabul. The Taliban closed it and beat her. She was threatened with death. This week she replied to EL PAÍS from a Western city. She lives freely now and has become the mother of a baby girl.

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