From Iraq to Afghanistan to the US, basic freedoms for women are being eroded as governments start rolling back existing laws.

Just a few months ago a ban on Afghan women speaking in public was the latest measure introduced by the Taliban, who took back control of the country in 2021. From August the ban included singing, reading aloud, reciting poetry and even laughing outside their homes.

The Taliban’s ministry for the propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice, which implements one of the most radical interpretations of Islamic law, enforces these rules. They are part of a broader set of “vice and virtue” laws that severely restrict women’s rights and freedoms. Women are even banned from reading the Quran out loud to other women in public.

In the past three years in Afghanistan, the Taliban has taken away many basic rights from women who live there, so that there’s very little that they are allowed to do. From 2021, the Taliban started introducing restrictions on girls receiving education, starting with a ban on coeducation and then a ban on girls attending secondary schools. This was followed by closing blind girls’ schools in 2023, and making it mandatory for girls in grades four to six (ages nine to 12) to cover their faces on the way to school.

Women can no longer attend universities or receive a degree certificate nationally, or follow midwifery or nursing training in the Kandahar region. Women are no longer allowed to be flight attendants, or to take a job outside the home. Women-run bakeries in the capital Kabul have now been banned. Women are mostly now unable to earn any money, or leave their homes. In April 2024, the Taliban in Helmand province told media outlets to even refrain from airing women’s voices.

Afghanistan is ranked last on the Women, Peace and Security Index and officials at the UN and elsewhere have called it “gender apartheid”. Afghan women are putting their lives on the line—facing surveillance, harassment, assault, arbitrary detention, torture and exile—to protest against the Taliban.

Many diplomats discuss how important it is to “engage” with the Taliban, yet this has not stopped the assault on women’s rights. When diplomats “engage”, they tend to focus on counter-terrorism, counternarcotics, business deals, or hostage returns. Despite everything that has happened to Afghan women over a short period, critics suggest this rarely makes it onto diplomats’ priority list.

Iraq’s age of consent

Meanwhile, in Iraq, on August 4 2024, an amendment to Iraq’s 1959 personal status law which would possibly lower the age of consent for marriage to nine years old from 18 (or 15 with permission from a judge and parents) was proposed by member of parliament Ra’ad al-Maliki and supported by conservative Shia factions in the government.

The law would have the potential of having matters of family law—such as marriage—adjudicated by religious authorities. This change could not only legalise child marriage but also strip women of rights related to divorce, child custody and inheritance.

Iraq already has a high rate of underage marriage, with 7 percent of girls married by 15 years old, and 28 percent married before the legal age of 18. Unregistered marriages, not legally recorded in court but conducted through religious or tribal authorities, prevent girls from accessing civil rights, and leave women and girls vulnerable to exploitation, abuse and neglect, with limited options for seeking justice.

Many women’s groups have already mobilised against the law. But the amendment has passed its second reading in parliament. If introduced, it could pave the way for further modifications that deepen sectarian divides and move the country further away from a unified legal system. It would also be an especially troubling step backward in protecting children’s rights and gender equality.

Abortion rights in the US

Meanwhile, in the US, women’s access to abortion has been eroded significantly in the past few years. In late 2021, the US was officially labelled a backsliding democracy by an international thinktank. Six months later, the landmark US Supreme Court ruling of Roe v Wade, which had safeguarded the constitutional right to abortion for nearly 50 years, was overturned. This led to a cascade of restrictive laws, with more than a quarter of US states enacting outright bans or severe restrictions on abortion.

Republican US congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested, in May 2022, that women should stay celibate if they did not want to get pregnant. If only all women had that choice. In fact, in the US a sexual assault occurs every 68 seconds. One in every five American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape. From 2009-13, US Child Protective Services agencies found strong evidence indicating that 63,000 children per year were victims of sexual abuse.

These developments reflect a troubling pattern. There is evidence from Donald Trump’s first term that there could be further erosion of women’s rights in his second presidency. During his previous term there were significant attempts to weaken healthcare access, with his foreign policy reinstating the “global gag rule” restricting access to women’s reproductive healthcare worldwide via funding conditions.

Fragility of women’s rights

If the world can tolerate the Taliban’s abuses, Iraq’s restrictive laws and the US restrictions on abortion access, it reveals the fragility of women’s and girls’ rights globally, and how easy it is to take them away.

The UN agency, UN Women, says it could take another 286 years to close the global gender gaps in legal protections. No country has yet achieved gender equality, based on the gender pay gap, legal equality and social inequality levels. Women and girls continue to face discrimination in all corners of the world, and it seems to be getting worse. But despite everything women continue to resist.

—The Conversation

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