First, her dreams of becoming a doctor were dashed by the Taliban’s ban on education. Then her family set up a forced marriage to her cousin, a heroin addict. Latifa* felt her future had been snatched away.
“I had two options: to marry an addict and live a life of misery or take my own life,” said the 18-year-old in a phone interview from her home in central Ghor province. “I chose the latter.”
Banning the reporting of suicide stats to try to save face is some nasty shit. Suicide is often a last attempt at asserting autonomy.
Honestly it’s so heartbreaking to read stories like this.
FYI: There’s a study published in March 2023 investigating the Prevalence and predictors of depression among women in Afghanistan (pdf, 9 pages). It is obvious that women are facing a harsh life reality which is far beyond what we can imagine here in our western world.
A recent national survey in Afghanistan reported that 47% of women suffered from mental health illnesses including depression [10]. An earlier survey conducted in 2003 evaluated the depression rate among women in Afghanistan. The survey reported high rates of clinical depression (73–78%) and suicidal ideation among Taliban-controlled regions versus those in a Pakistani refugee camp (28%) [11]. The provision of overall healthcare services including psychiatric services has been halted or inaccessible due to an ongoing political crisis in the country [12]. […]
Women in Afghanistan face chronic trauma, emotional abuse, and patriarchal community ideals which may lead extreme depression and suicidal thoughts [13, 14]. Gender-based violence against women, forced marriages, and the impact of war are the most important factors for this [14]. Traditional practices and customs, early marriage, and teenage pregnancies make it more difficult for women to obtain an education, learn new skills, and inherit property, all of which contribute to poor mental health outcomes [15].
This article strikes me in a way that I’m finding very difficult to put into words. Basically I can’t imagine this is any business of the average Guardian reader who is not going to be able to do anything about it other than to support another invasion or contra-like rebel group. Anyone speaking English as a first language has no credibility to exercise soft power to mitigate this in any way, and that is because for centuries the governments of people who primarily speak English have cemented the idea in the Afghan national identity (maybe the only nationally unifying idea) that Westerners are treacherous and not to be trusted meddling in Afghanistan’s internal affairs. This is especially given that this very meddling there and with other nearby countries is why the Taliban exists in the way it does. However this is addressed our involvement would not help and would likely lead to another exploitative apparatus. Maybe it might soften readers’ attitudes towards accepting refugees, but if they’re already reading The Guardian I’m not sure this is going to change anyone’s mind from one position to the other.
We have groups of people who are massively disproportionately ending their lives out of hopelessness in our nations and our spheres of influence. We may be able to do something about our own cultural flaws or those of our allies with whom we have some credibility.
I understand your concerns but: sometimes the role of an ally is to listen, to acknowledge, and to bear witness.
Not to jump in screaming “here I come to save you”. The immediate knee-jerk focus of “should we invade” is galling, sure, but I don’t think the alternative needs to be to let’s all look away and block our ears.
Knowing what other people in this world are going through is important part of being a human.
When I met someone who is in exile and I was familiar with the basics of why she is an exile, that mattered to her.
I’m just one ill woman in a small country of 5 million, but when I saw some people online warning that their country had just blacked out their internet, the fact that I was already up to speed with the implications in that context meant I could immediately contact our foriegn affairs minister to ask we send a signal that the world is watching -and I got a reply, too, about the diplomatic actions we were taking.
When I protested Apartheid I was just a child. Years later, I found out some of those suffering under Apartheid had heard of our tiny country’s protest and taken comfort from it at that time.
No, I did not solve anyone’s problems, and nor did they want me to - but it still matters.
I agree with you in general. My concern is specifically with a place which for centuries has asked us to leave them alone and we refuse to. This situation is of course terrible, and our (my country’s) actions in their country is the indirect cause of their dilemma, but I don’t think that we (meaning our institutions) are the ones we can trust to help them. That being the case my view is softened by your appeal just to express support on an individual level because it’s probably the best we can do with the way things are. I really do hope they can find some way to resolve this. My concern is just with encouraging support in our part of the world to go make things worse again, which is all we have been doing to their part of the world for a very long time.
I understand the concern you feel - and I agree that public support for invasive interventions can be inflamed (or in some cases, downright manufactured) by news media.
I think you’re right to be wary of encouraging support, and we in the west as a whole should resist buying into or perpetuating those kinds of discourses.
In this case, I don’t think that’s what this article, or the partner journalists, or the underlying study, are intending, though. This is a “world news” section so by its very nature it is mostly about things outside our remit. (I acknowledge that this is easier for me to say as someone in a small nation that did not join the coalition to invade Afghanistan. If I were in a country with huge global political power it would probably feel a bit glib to just say “we” are not in charge).
Not really sure why you keep bashing The Guardian… Have you seen the UK’s top most read papers (The Sun and The Daily Mail)?
I’m not bashing the Guardian, and out of widespread publications I would definitely say they are among the best. My criticism is based on their primary and secondary audiences residing in places whose governments’ actions have rendered them incapable of assisting Afghanistan or its people. As a side note my first exposure to The Daily Mail was when it was being distributed for free at the airport, and it made me so angry I threw it in the trash with much more force than I realized. Awful racist rag.
Edit: I’m suggesting in my previous comment that Guardian readers are already likely to support refugees or else they would be reading the Sun or the Daily Mail instead.
I’m still not entirely sure, what your point is. Don’t report things already known to be bad? You seem to be enjoying using overly complex sentences, but you don’t actually say anything worth typing.
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They have explicitly linked it to Taliban restrictions on every aspect of women’s existence, from a ban on education above elementary level and a prohibition on most work, to a bar on entering parks, bathhouses and other public spaces.
Shaharzad Akbar, a former chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission – an organisation targeted by the Taliban insurgency and now operating in exile – said social stigma meant such secrecy was common.
“The rare instance when [relatives] willingly admit to suicide is when they don’t want any member of the family to be accused of murder,” said Akbar, who is now executive director of Rawadari, a new Afghan human rights organisation.
Warnings about female suicides are only intensifying as the Taliban tighten controls on every aspect of women’s lives, most recently banning beauty salons.
In May, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, said he was “alarmed about widespread mental health issues and accounts of escalating suicides among women and girls”.
“They don’t have much room for expressing their protests and disagreements,” said Julie Billaud, an anthropology professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute and the author of Kabul Carnival, a book about gender politics in postwar Afghanistan.
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