Australia’s Pledge, The Taliban’s Punishment Code – OpEd
In the new Australian promise of giving fifty million dollars in humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, it is geared toward saving lives of people with a particular target of saving women and girls and necessities. It is significant, as hunger, displacement and avoidable disease will not wait until the politics time. The oath however is lost in the moral fog: the same, who are the forces to be, are putting repression into statute even as the world is opening aid that would be of most benefit to most of the victims of the said repression. This is an ambivalence that is not the abstract one, and it is the working environment.
The Taliban is becoming outspoken. Women are not allowed to further their education once they have lower grades, most of the employment and avoid the mainstream life. They do not constitute some temporary restraints that die. They obliterate the avenues that will make humanitarian aid less significant in future: literacy, skills, income and civic voice. Dependence is a result when you become deprived of self-reliance. You can then call that dependence an argument that the women must be assisted and render it impossible that women will come out of the dependents.
Today the legal architecture is starting to adhere to the social reality. Women have been penalized on mere movement and communication with family members such as visiting family without the approval of husbands as reported new policies on criminal activities embraced by the Taliban have been reported. In other words, even the slightest acts that are used to keep one in affinity and support networks might be redefined as criminality. It is not only control, but this is also policy isolation. It narrows the way of the world of a woman and punishes her because of leaving it.
It is also chilling enough such that these provisions make marriage imprisonment. The code and analysis explain instances where the women will be jailed since they refuse to go back to a home of a husband even in such cases of an abusive or unwanted home. The coercion instrument of the privacy is the state. The blackmail is extremely direct: obey or be deprived of your freedom. It is not a family law, but a system of capturing people disguised in legal terms.
It appears that the same structure justifies domestic violence. Provisions that permit husbands or guardians to punish women are found in the analysis and definition of violence that emphasizes on observable serious harm and excludes psychological harm and sexual violence, and coercion. The legislation that counts bruises that you can identify is educative to the abusers on how far they can go. It also makes women aware that their agony is non existential until it is made visible, explicit and uncontroversial.
This is one of the points where the help story fails. The word aid to women comes close to empowerment, but what of the meaning of aid to women on the one hand and the fact that women are made legally invisible as the decision makers and liable to autonomy on the other? Food packages and visits to clinics can ensure that one stays alive, but that cannot substitute rights. What is even more contemptible, humanitarian efforts must bend themselves into pretzels and help in the manner that will not offend the government, but the latter is disrespecting dignity in our very face. Survival is rather the ceiling than the floor.
There is also another collision in real life which a donor cannot avoid. When the condition is more limiting to the health worker who is female, women and girls are deprived to safe health care especially in areas where interaction with the male practitioners is already limited by gender norms. You cannot compromise nutrition programs directed to pregnant women, maternal health care or referral services to the protection programs in any way by means of squeezing out of the same woman the part of that woman that can reach them with an ethical and effective scope. Policy is disruptive to delivery in the field Aid planners can plan the perfect intervention on paper, but once it is translated into policy, women are unable to work.
The prohibitions of education are the fuse. Not only swindle the now but wipe off the future. A girl who has never gone to school turns into a schoolers woman the next day and a mother the day after that. And this is how a crisis is changed into permanence. It is ensuring that any new tranche of humanitarian funding is reacting to the same crisis, as the conditions that bring about the resilience is being criminalized. It is this order that the Taliban will consequently be able to brag over because they dominate the society that is not knowingly being given the chance to heal itself.
Yes Australia, ought to finance lifesaving aid. But the world should end its delusion that money is the solution to gender persecution that is being formalized, made normal, and transfigured into the daily life via the courts and the policing. The help sustains people but, unless it is really challenged by the measures that obliterate women in the social life, it does not bring dignity, rights and future. The silence which accompanies the constant delivery is not valent. It is a message and the Taliban is deciphering it as a permission.