David Pratt: Crushing women’s rights anywhere is a threat to our common security

You don’t need to be active on social media to have noticed the immediate regressive impact the return of the Islamist inspired Taliban have had on women and girls’ rights in the country.

But only yesterday on Twitter there was yet another covertly shot video posted of a Taliban member lashing out at a young woman on the streets of Kabul who had the “audacity” to be out walking alone. Pictures too of female students sitting in segregated lecture halls clad in black head-to-toe burqas to the Taliban’s “specifications” have also been doing the rounds and rightly outraging many.

Few would deny that the US-led coalition was far from ideal in its role in Afghanistan and the nature of its departure nothing short of a disgrace. That said, it’s worth pausing just for a moment to remember those improvements in the rights of women and girls that it did help foster.

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For example, when the Taliban were first knocked from power in 2001, primary-school enrolment of Afghan girls rose from 0% to above 80%. Infant mortality meanwhile fell by half and forced marriage was made illegal. Fast forward the clock and all this is being set back in an instant with the return of the Taliban.

But as the narrative of The Economist article argues it’s not just in Afghanistan that evidence shows how nations that oppress women are more likely to be violent and unstable.

Just cast an eye across the annual Fragile States Index report compiled by the Fund for Peace think tank and it immediately reveals how all of the 20 most turbulent countries for example practise polygamy.

As if to underline this, just a few weeks ago the West African nation of Guinea was subjected to a coup, this in a country where 42% of married women aged 15-49 are in polygamous unions.

What, you might well ask yourself, could possibly be the relationship between these two things and how is it significant?

Well, as detailed research has revealed, “multiple wives for men at the top means brooding bachelorhood for those at the bottom”. That might seem like a glib or sweeping generalisation but drill down into many societies like this and the connection becomes apparent.

Time and again across the world I’ve seen for myself how the ranks of criminal gangs and militia or terrorist groups become filled with angry young men, plagued by feelings of inadequacy, disenfranchisement or alienation.

A shot from a video released by Boko Haram showing girls they had taken captive

Recruiters for extremist groups like Boko Haram in Nigeria or the Islamic State (IS) group in Iraq, Syria or elsewhere know this, promising “wives” to those young men that make up their cadres.

In many other societies based on male bonding it’s a similar story. In Latin America, with its reputation for machismo, one in three women will suffer some form of violence in their lifetime, according to a 2019 Pan American Health Organisation estimate. Grassroot women’s movements offer support networks, but they can only do so much. It’s no coincidence too that the growth in such problems is inextricably connected to wider political failings.

For example, almost three decades have now passed since the first parliamentary gender quota was approved in Latin America. But still women in much of the region today face political violence, blocks to their participation and a culture that burdens them with childcare. As a result, progress of women in politics has stalled in one of the world’s most economically unequal places.

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It’s quite a contrast to a time not so long ago when women led some of Latin America’s biggest nations, including Brazil, Argentina and Chile.

Now, out of 33 countries including the Caribbean, only two have female presidents. It’s the same story repeated in cabinets and parliaments, where despite quotas that mandate 40% or 50% participation, women occupy less than a third of those posts.

What research shows globally is that in many places, negative attitudes toward women – such as forced or early marriage for girls, polygamy, violence against women, unequal property rights, bride “prices”, son preference and other numerous factors, are corrosive components in many of the world’s most volatile countries.

Hard as it is to believe in this day and age, but dowries or bride prices are common in half the world’s countries. It’s estimated too that a fifth of the world’s young women were married before the age of 18 and a 20th before 15.

These child brides, evidence shows, are more likely to drop out of school, less able to stand up to abusive husbands and less likely to raise healthy, well-educated children.

It speaks volumes that all these aforementioned factors appear highly correlated with violent instability in a country.

Lately the world’s attention has understandably been focused on the setback to women’s rights in Afghanistan at the hands of the Taliban. But as recent UN data from 170 other nations elsewhere has shown the majority of women worldwide are paid 16% less than men, and nearly one in five had experienced domestic violence in the previous year.

It found too that men held 75% of parliamentary seats, 73% of managerial positions and made up 70% of climate negotiators and almost all of the peace negotiators.

In fact, between 1992 and 2019, only 13% of negotiators and 6% of signatories of peace deals were female. Yet peace tends to last longer when women are at the table.

So much is at stake here, and if anything “good” might yet come from watching the efforts to improve the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan vanish before our eyes, it’s perhaps a determination to double down on our commitment worldwide.

After all, as The Economist leader rightly points out, “policymakers who fail to consider the interests of half of humanity, cannot hope to understand the world”.

I might not have agreed with former US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton on many things, but she so hit the nail on the head a decade ago when she observed that “The subjugation of women is…a threat to the common security of our world.”