Taliban Treatment of Women - Punishments

Punishments

Punishments were often carried out publicly, either as formal spectacles held in sports stadiums or town squares or spontaneous street beatings. Civilians lived in fear of harsh penalties as there was little mercy; women caught breaking decrees were often treated with force. Examples:

• In October 1996, a woman had the tip of her thumb cut off for wearing nail varnish.
• In December 1996, Radio Shari’a announced that 225 Kabul women had been seized and punished for violating the sharia code of dress. The sentence was handed down by a tribunal and the women were lashed on their legs and backs for their misdemeanor.
• In May 1997, five female CARE International employees with authorisation from the Ministry of the Interior to conduct research for an emergency feeding programme were forced from their vehicle by members of the religious police. The guards used a public address system to insult and harass the women before striking them with a metal and leather whip over 1.5 meters (almost 5 feet) in length.

• In 1999, a mother of seven was executed in front of 30,000 spectators in Kabul’s Ghazi Sport stadium for allegedly murdering her abusive husband (see right). She was imprisoned for three years and extensively tortured prior to the execution, yet she refused to plead her innocence in a bid to protect her daughter (reportedly the actual culprit).
• When a Taliban raid discovered a woman running an informal school in her apartment, they beat the children and threw the woman down a flight of stairs (breaking her leg), and then imprisoned her. They threatened to stone her family publicly if she refused to sign a declaration of loyalty to the Taliban and their laws.
• An Afghan girl named Bibi Aisha was promised to a new family through a tribal method of solving disputes known as baad. When she fled the violence girls often suffer under baad, her new family found her and a Taliban commander ordered her punished as an example, "lest other girls in the village try to do the same thing". Her ears and nose were cut off and she was left for dead in the mountains, but survived.
• Working women are threatened into quitting their jobs. Failure to comply with Taliban's threats has led to women being shot and killed as in the case of 22-year old Hossai in July 2010.

Many punishments were carried out by individual militias without the sanction of Taliban authorities, as it was against official Taliban policy to punish women in the street. A more official line was the punishment of men for instances of female misconduct: a reflection of a patriarchal society and the belief that men are duty bound to control women. Maulvi Kalamadin stated in 1997, “since we cannot directly punish women, we try to use taxi drivers and shopkeepers as a means to pressurize them" to conform. Examples of the punishment of men:

• If a taxi driver picked up a female customer with her face uncovered or unaccompanied by a mahram then he faced a jail sentence and the husband would be punished.
• If a woman was caught washing clothes in a river then she would be escorted home by Islamic authorities where her husband/mahram would be severely punished.
• Tailors found taking female measurements faced imprisonment.