Women in Afghanistan
The Issue
To everyone here, and to everyone who cares about what is right, and wants to speak up for those who are silenced and have no voice,
I am here to speak for millions of Afghanistan women whose dreams were stolen by the Taliban. Afghanistan is the only country on Earth where it is illegal for a girl to go to school past twelve years old. Think about being twelve, which is just year 8. That is the exact moment Afghan girls are told their minds do not matter and they have to just shut up and stay home. But home is not home for them, it’s been reported that women experience increasing violence at home by husbands, fathers and brothers. I may not be speaking for all people when it comes to abuse at home, but I’m speaking for 87% which is about 39.4 million of afghanistan women.Since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, there has been a disturbing surge in the number of women taking their own lives or attempting to do so, data collected from public hospitals and mental health clinics across a third of Afghanistan’s regions shows.
The Taliban’s rules are totally messed up. At a big UN meeting, someone pointed out that a squirrel in Kabul has more rights than an Afghan girl. A squirrel can run around a public park and a bird can sing outside. But a human girl is banned from parks and cannot even speak or make a sound outside without getting punished by the police. It makes no sense that animals have more freedom than actual human beings. It is torture. These women aren’t living, there surviving in this cruel world.
It gets so much worse than that. The Taliban took away every single law that used to protect women from violence. There are awful stories about girls who were attacked and hurt, but instead of getting help, they were locked up and forced to marry their own rapist because of the Taliban cruel rules. If these girls scream for help, they are the ones who get in trouble and thrown in jail.
As a child we all had a dream, my dream was to be a hairdresser or detective, that goes the same for the afghan women, except they can’t live their dream, they cant even fight for it. There not even allowed to have formal jobs. Our dream Job is just reality, but for them, it isn’t possible to happen. There’s a women out there, dreaming to be a doctor, we never know, she could have came up with the cure for cancer. Another women dreamt of being a police officer, she could’ve saved the city from a cruel murderer but we would never know. We can’t even hear their opinions, let alone we cant even see their faces. Imagine being covered head to toe in blue itchy fabric, covering your whole identity.
The famous lines from the amazing Sheryl Lee Ralph were “Just because you have rights today does not mean that you will have rights tomorrow" and every word of that is true. Face reality. We may not have our rights tomorrow. We may not be able to speak up for these poor people in horrid conditions tomorrow. We can’t predict things. We may just get all our rights taken away in a click of fingers. Thats why we have to speak while we can, so we can save people who have been silenced.
We cannot just ignore this and swipe past it on our phones. We cannot look away just because it is happening far away. We have to keep speaking up and demanding justice until every Afghan girl can walk back into a world where she belongs.
Thank you.
1
The Issue
To everyone here, and to everyone who cares about what is right, and wants to speak up for those who are silenced and have no voice,
I am here to speak for millions of Afghanistan women whose dreams were stolen by the Taliban. Afghanistan is the only country on Earth where it is illegal for a girl to go to school past twelve years old. Think about being twelve, which is just year 8. That is the exact moment Afghan girls are told their minds do not matter and they have to just shut up and stay home. But home is not home for them, it’s been reported that women experience increasing violence at home by husbands, fathers and brothers. I may not be speaking for all people when it comes to abuse at home, but I’m speaking for 87% which is about 39.4 million of afghanistan women.Since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, there has been a disturbing surge in the number of women taking their own lives or attempting to do so, data collected from public hospitals and mental health clinics across a third of Afghanistan’s regions shows.
The Taliban’s rules are totally messed up. At a big UN meeting, someone pointed out that a squirrel in Kabul has more rights than an Afghan girl. A squirrel can run around a public park and a bird can sing outside. But a human girl is banned from parks and cannot even speak or make a sound outside without getting punished by the police. It makes no sense that animals have more freedom than actual human beings. It is torture. These women aren’t living, there surviving in this cruel world.
It gets so much worse than that. The Taliban took away every single law that used to protect women from violence. There are awful stories about girls who were attacked and hurt, but instead of getting help, they were locked up and forced to marry their own rapist because of the Taliban cruel rules. If these girls scream for help, they are the ones who get in trouble and thrown in jail.
As a child we all had a dream, my dream was to be a hairdresser or detective, that goes the same for the afghan women, except they can’t live their dream, they cant even fight for it. There not even allowed to have formal jobs. Our dream Job is just reality, but for them, it isn’t possible to happen. There’s a women out there, dreaming to be a doctor, we never know, she could have came up with the cure for cancer. Another women dreamt of being a police officer, she could’ve saved the city from a cruel murderer but we would never know. We can’t even hear their opinions, let alone we cant even see their faces. Imagine being covered head to toe in blue itchy fabric, covering your whole identity.
The famous lines from the amazing Sheryl Lee Ralph were “Just because you have rights today does not mean that you will have rights tomorrow" and every word of that is true. Face reality. We may not have our rights tomorrow. We may not be able to speak up for these poor people in horrid conditions tomorrow. We can’t predict things. We may just get all our rights taken away in a click of fingers. Thats why we have to speak while we can, so we can save people who have been silenced.
We cannot just ignore this and swipe past it on our phones. We cannot look away just because it is happening far away. We have to keep speaking up and demanding justice until every Afghan girl can walk back into a world where she belongs.
Thank you.
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Petition created on 30 September 2026