Blog 4: Afghani Women Imprisoned for "Moral Crimes"

     The Afghani government has been imprisoning girls and women for so called "moral crimes" however these moral crimes include running from domestic violence, arranged marriages, unsafe relationships, and sex outside of marriage. Women that have been interviewed have said that they felt as though they needed to get away from their marriage. They felt threatened daily and felt unsafe in their own households and because of this they were put in juvenile detention centers. What's more shocking about this story than anything is that the taliban was overthrown ten years ago and women should be treated better today but they are not. Almost nothing has changed for these women in their relationships. There have been significant improvements in women's education, employment, and political standing but these are hard to celebrate when women who go to the police in dire need of help are instead arrested for their "crime" of leaving their abusive husband or relatives. It is technically not illegal for women to flee from abusive relationships but the Afghani Supreme Court have made it clear that women who flee should be treated as criminals and they can punished with up to 15 years in prison. Some women in prison who were interviewed said that if they knew their choices were going to be prison or going home to their husbands, they would just commit suicide. It's surprising how little power these women have in their own relationships. Divorce would be an option if it wasn't so hard for a woman to divorce a man in Afghanistan. A man can simply declare himself divorced while a woman has to go through many obstacles to even be considered for a divorce. Afghanistan feels they have more important issues in their country right now but one of the first things they need to fix is gender inequality.
   
      Living in America, it is very hard to imagine being put in a situation like this. Yes there have been instances in America where women have been forced to stay in a relationship and they feel so threatened that they end up killing their husbands but these are few and far between. Especially because the divorce rate in America is so high, it's hard to imagine being imprisoned from fleeing a violent household. I understand that when a country is in the process of a revolution/recovering from a revolution it will take a while to get everything in order but I agree with the author of this article who said that inequality is one of the most important issues in any country and it needs to be dealt with in order to run any country smoothly. However there are almost no countries in the entire world that show true equality when it comes to gender, socioeconomic status, sexuality, race, ethnicity. The world is a backwards place where the white male is the most important person in the world. This needs to be fixed. No woman should have to choose between imprisonment and an abusive relationship.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/human-rights-watch/afghanistan-hundreds-of-w_b_1384984.html