THE ECONOMIST: Women are treated horribly in Afghanistan — and in many other places

Imagine, in 2026, a country where adult black citizens must obtain permission from white “guardians” to travel, work, marry, divorce, pursue an education, seek medical care or even leave their homes.

The idea is nearly unthinkable. That is because, by the end of the 20th century, the legal subordination of one race to another had crossed a moral line the world largely agreed should never be crossed again.

And yet, women and girls across much of the world still find themselves on the wrong side of that line.

In nearly a third of countries, laws restrict women’s freedom of movement; in some, wives need their husbands’ permission to work, travel or leave home.

In nearly 20 countries wives can be penalised for disobeying their partner.

Male-guardianship laws in several continue to deny women full legal autonomy, even after recent reforms.

Some 118 million women of reproductive age live in countries that ban abortion without exception. Female genital mutilation continues in 94 countries — and in more than a third there is no law against it.

When people think of the oppression of women today, Afghanistan usually comes to mind first.

Girls are barred from education beyond the age of 11-12. Women are banned from most jobs and public life.

Husbands can beat their wives provided they leave no broken bones. A new law allows girls to be married off before reaching puberty and treats their silence as consent.

Women and girls in Afghanistan have all but lost their futures, whereas Taliban officials are being invited to diplomatic talks in European capitals.

What began as widespread condemnation has gradually hardened into tolerance, reduced to the occasional headline and a passing dinner-party lament.

Yet as the Taliban’s second reign enters its sixth year — an unwelcome anniversary that falls on August 15 — it raises another question.

If Afghanistan represents one end of the spectrum, a place where the oppression of women and girls has reached dystopian, Handmaid’s Tale levels, what about the vast middle ground?

What about the hundreds of millions of women and girls who live under restrictions that shape their everyday lives, yet ordinary enough that the world has come to accept them?

Over the past decade my work has focused on places where law and culture intersect in ways that shape and often limit women’s lives.

I have seen how culture shapes law, how law reinforces culture and how both work together to set the boundaries of women’s freedom.

I have come to believe two things. First: across countries, cultures, religions and political systems, women and girls want many of the same basic things: safety, dignity, freedom, education and the chance to shape their own lives. Second: the oppression of women and girls exists on a continuum, and most of the world falls somewhere in the middle of it.

That continuum runs from the Taliban’s total erasure of women from public life to the personal-status laws in countries that attend G20 summits and sign international conventions on women’s rights.

Earlier this year the Islamic Republic of Iran — a regime that arrests, beats and imprisons women for showing their hair in public — was appointed vice-chair of a United Nations committee charged with strengthening the principles of the UN Charter.

Iran was expelled from the UN Commission on the Status of Women in 2022 after a nationwide uprising.

Less remembered is that it had been elected to that commission only a year before, raising the question: what exactly had changed — the regime’s treatment of women, or the world’s willingness to pay attention?

But what about the women whose lives rarely, if ever, make global headlines?

What of the women living under male guardianship laws in Yemen; the women in Pakistan killed each year in the name of so-called honour; the women in Honduras, where a woman is murdered every 20 hours and 90 per cent of femicides go unpunished; or the girls in South Sudan, who are more likely to die in childbirth than to finish secondary school, and where one in three is pregnant before 15?

At a recent dinner in Cairo, a friend from Gaza who fled to Egypt two years ago described what life had been like before she left.

As a woman, she told me, her freedom of movement was often dictated by the men in her family.

“The fact that I can live by myself in Egypt . . .” she said. “My favourite thing is being able to step outside my house, feel the fresh air and go for a walk without anyone’s permission.”

My friend’s dream was nothing extraordinary. It is one shared by millions of women in many places — and you will probably never hear about them.

The question is not whether women everywhere aspire to the same lives, or even the same set of freedoms or ideals. Rather, it is who decides the limits of those lives.

Who decides what freedom should look like for a girl born into a system she did not choose, and what happens when she has little or no power to challenge it?

Five years into Taliban rule, the world should treat the group’s war on women as the global moral emergency that it is, with far greater urgency and resolve.

The question is whether it is equally willing to confront the fate of the hundreds of millions of women and girls whose lives will never make headlines, shaped not by Taliban edicts, but by laws, customs and systems the world has come to accept.

Sarah Little is the founder and editor of More to Her Story, an independent news organisation reporting on the lives of women and girls.