14th August 2026
5 years of Taliban rule: Generations of progress erased for women and girls
By Michelle Shahid
14 min read
News and Insights
End child marriage
Afghanistan
15 August 2026 marks five years since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan. In this time, the de facto authorities (DFA) have issued close to 100 edicts, decrees and directives restricting nearly every aspect of women’s and girls’ lives, from their voices being banned in public to extremely limited education and work opportunities, no minimum age for marriage and a justice system controlled by the Taliban.
This did not happen to a country with no history of protecting women. Between 2001 and 2021, Afghanistan built a legal framework that, however imperfectly applied, moved in the right direction. The 2004 Constitution guaranteed equality between men and women. The 2009 Law on the Elimination of Violence against Women (EVAW law) criminalised 22 distinct forms of violence, including child and forced marriage, rape, beating, denial of the right to education, work and access to health services, and
baad
(giving away a woman or girl to settle a dispute). The 2019 Law on the Protection of Child Rights defined a child, for the first time in Afghan law, as anyone under 18. Marriage among girls under 18 fell
from 46% in 1998 to 29% by 2023
.
None of that legal framework exists any longer. Five years on, we trace what has actually happened, and what it means for Afghan women and girls.
Tracing violations
The institutions built to protect women are
gone:
In September 2021, within a month of taking power, the Taliban replaced the Ministry of Women’s Affairs with the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. In May 2022, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, the body responsible for investigating rights violations, was dissolved by administrative decree on the basis that the DFA considered it “unnecessary.” Specialised courts and prosecution units that had enforced the EVAW law were disbanded, and family courts were folded into ordinary civil courts. Women’s shelters were also closed. A woman experiencing violence or discrimination today has no institution left whose job it is to investigate her complaint, prosecute it, or shelter her while it is resolved.
Women and girls are locked out of education and work:
Girls were barred from secondary school within weeks of the takeover, and from university altogether by December 2022. Afghanistan is now the only country in the world where girls are barred from secondary and tertiary education. Women civil servants were instructed not to attend their workplaces in November 2021; by January 2026, the DFA had removed them from the payroll entirely, with some women learning of their dismissal only when a salary payment failed to arrive. Women have also been barred from working for NGOs, since December 2022, and for the UN, since April 2023. Nearly
80% of young Afghan women are now not in education, employment or training
, compared with 20% of young men.
Justice system rebuilt to exclude women:
All judges appointed under the previous government, including approximately 270 women, have been dismissed. They have been replaced exclusively by Taliban-affiliated men who lack legal training and pass judgements according to Taliban-issued edicts rather than established legal principles.
There are no women judges, prosecutors, or officially registered lawyers left
in the country. Reaching a court at all requires a
mahram
(male chaperone related to a woman), who is frequently the very person a woman is seeking protection from.
Women and girls confined to the home:
Women have been barred from parks and amusement parks without a
mahram
, from travelling more than 72 kilometres without one, and from driving altogether. By 2022, public parks, gyms and baths were closed to women entirely. In
2024 UN consultations
, around 8 in 10 Afghan women reported being denied access to public space in the previous year, even when accompanied by a
mahram
, and roughly 7 in 10 said they felt unsafe going outside alone. The space available to a woman in Afghanistan has narrowed to her home, and even that is not guaranteed to be safe.