• Afghan women have been beaten and raped and afforded no justice or even acknowledgement that what was done to them was wrong.
• Afghan women were forced to stop their education. 97% of women in Afghanistan are illiterate.
• Afghan women have been forced into marriages not of their own choosing, often when they are as young as 14 to men in their 50’s.
• Afghan women have lost their children, even multiple children, to land mines and war.
• Afghan women have lost their husbands and sole source of income.
• Afghan women have been injured in war.
• Afghan women have been forced to live in fear. Even now many wear the burqa for fear that the old regime, who are still present, may harm them.
• Afghan women have been forced to beg or sift through trash to find food because they were stripped of opportunities to learn a skill to support themselves.

There are an estimated 1.5 million widows in Afghanistan, 70,000 in Kabul alone. These widows have an average of between five and eight children each. In previous times, if a woman's husband died, a brother or her deceased husband’s brother would take her and her children in and care for her. Because of the years of war, many of these widows have lost so many male family members, there is no one to care for them. As an older woman, she may be forced to beg or dig through trash for survival.

Because girls were not allowed to go to school during the six years of Taliban rule, girls attending 1st grade are now 12 years old and 6th graders are 19 and 20 years old. These young women and girls are at risk for being pressured into marriages not of their own choosing. One young woman who was scheduled to be married to a man almost twice her age contemplated suicide and said, “I’m a human, not an animal.”

Copyright © 2007 OneMaker