Girls banned from attending school

[Thighbyebaby]

Couldn’t see a thread on this but I am following in disbelief, and confused why there is not more outrage over this.

Girls in Afghanistan have been banned from attending school for 7 months. And today, the day they were due to be allowed back again, the taliban govt have backtracked and banned them.

Girls over the age of 12 denied an education.

How is this happening in 2022?

Yes, it's grim, OP.

www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/23/girls-in-afghanistan-school-taliban

what a surprise

the fuckers

Appalling.

This is how girls and women are seen in too many parts of the world. Expendable and unimportant .

The situation for girls and women continues to be shameful the world over.

I saw the pictures of girls crying when they learned their school would not be reopening - heartbreaking.

Maybe they could identify out of it? Yeah right. The older I get, the more disappointed in men I become.

They were always going to do this, the fact they left it to the last moment adds more cruelty. Men deciding what the uniform for girls should be is the excuse. Girls treated like rubbish and denied an education just because they were born female. Men deciding the boundaries women and girls have. Men telling women and girls what they must wear and where they can go. Misogyny drips through this world like acid.

Awful, unsurprising but still awful. Those poor girls.

I saw this on the news. I am so pissed off.
The girls in the film speaking to the head also sounded outraged, I thought, which I was glad of.

It is galling but, sadly, not surprising.

In the meantime, some people on this side of the world think women have fat too many rights. You couldn't make it up.

Unsurprising, but so crushingly disappointing. These girls only get one chance at an education and it's already been disrupted, and will be now for who knows how long. These men are cowardly fuckers.

I can’t find the link quickly but there’s a report showing only 40% of countries globally offer boys and girls the same opportunities in education.

everyone absorbs this information on some level and makes a judgement on the importance of girls.

Beyond heartbreaking for those girls. Imagine having education, hopes for a future, and then it being taken away in such a finite way. What can they even dream of now?

Women's rights are granted and denied at the whim of men in every single country. The men denying western women some of their rights currently think they're so much better than men from places like Afghanistan. They can't see their actions are part of the same continuum, part of the same attitude which sees women as merely props in the lives of the actual humans - males.

That age limit is probably picked because it is close to menarche, and at that point the kind of extremist Islam the Taliban preaches would regard the girls not as girls but as women.

Other explanations might exist. I read a lot about the tenets of the Islam the Taliban prefers during the previous round. At that time they allowed small girls to be educated (though sometimes only at home) so that they could learn to read the Quran. After that, no more education for vulva people!

We shall see if the new version is going to be any different from the earlier one. Perhaps not quite as extreme but also better prepared to disguise the moves it plans to make.

@WalrusSubmarine

I can’t find the link quickly but there’s a report showing only 40% of countries globally offer boys and girls the same opportunities in education.

everyone absorbs this information on some level and makes a judgement on the importance of girls.

And this is why the erasure of all names for the female sex is so extremely harmful: This oppression is based on sex, and we need to be able to have names for its victims so that we can fight back.

I read the BBC coverage just after it was published & it seems remarkable (but wonderful) that there has been a rise in female primary school attendance since the Taliban takeover as security improved.

UNICEF keep saying gender when they mean sex, which is frankly an affront to the 129 million girls of school age who aren’t in education & the 1 in 3 girls from the poorest households who have never been to school. Female genital mutilation, child marriage, experiencing violence because you have a female body - none of those things are related to gender; & none of those things could be identified out of. The World Bank* use gender too, but their stuff is still worth reading.

Sustainable Development Goal** 4 feels a long way out of reach, frankly - especially having failed to achieve MDG 2 Mind you, the UN use gender not sex, so some SDGs (notably 5) are rendered meaningless & the fact sheets frankly insulting.

The first two points on the UN SDG 5 “facts & figures” sheets are:
• Globally, 750 million women and girls were married before the age of 18 and at least 200 million women and girls in 30 countries have undergone FGM.
• The rates of girls between 15-19 who are subjected to FGM (female genital mutilation) in the 30 countries where the practice is concentrated have dropped from 1 in 2 girls in 2000 to 1 in 3 girls by 2017.
These things happen to girls & women because of their sex. Gender has no place in this discourse - it is now actively harmful not simply unhelpful; & it needs to stop.

*whose research turned up the info on primary school attendance in Afghanistan
** UN Millennium Development Goals
UN Sustainable Development Goals

What will become of those girls. This was so depressingly predictable from the news of the withdrawal.
The UN and aid agencies have added to this geopolitical mess to create a permissive culture for these harms.

It’s heartbreaking.

But I never understand the ‘it’s 2022’ remarks.

Why does anyone presume that the human race is on some sort of upward trajectory?

It's heartbreaking and criminal. The US must have known that it would be women and girls feeling the most impact of them leaving Afghanistan; they're just collateral damage.

Heartbreaking

Those poor girls, turning up to school so excited, then having their hopes and dreams dashed.

Does anyone know if the practice of allowing one girl in a family without boys to pretend to be a boy and be educated until puberty still happens? Perhaps this has been stopped in the last few years but certainly in the past this did happen and led to a generation of women’s rights activists. Appalled still at the cruelty of the world towards those female people.

I read today that this means no female doctors and midwives will be trained, yet a woman can't have a man attend her at birth , so women will get to a stage where there is no medical help for them giving birth. This is barbaric, if true.

If they keep the girls uneducated they can control them - give them to men to do what they want. It's pure horror.
What can be done?

I feel like this should be in the feminist chat , right?

But this is sickening news.

Awful. Is there anything we can do?