By Jessica Anderson
From 1996 through 2001, the Taliban banned education for girls in Afghanistan. Afterward, remnants of the Taliban continued to attack and destroy girls’ schools. Violence against schoolgirls is so extreme that 80% of schools in southern Afghanistan have been closed. In many ways, the situation is improving today. Girls in Afghanistan may now attend school in previously controlled fundamentalist states with 1.14 million girls currently listed as enrolled. In other areas however, as few as three percent of the student population is female, As more opportunities have become available for girls and women in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the dangers of pursuing those opportunities have also increased, and those girls who do attempt to attend school, face many dangers and horrors.. Recent news reports document campaigns of violence and terror where girls are psychologically and physically tortured in an effort keep them from being educated in order to maintain the social hierarchy. Fundamentalists have resorted to gas attacks on the girls, destroying the schools by bombing or burning, and throwing of sulfuric acid into the schoolgirls’ faces. Though the majority of such incidents are reported from Afghanistan and Pakistan, similar issues occur in other states dominated by conservative governments. Sadly, the world is largely ignorant of the trials these girls face; they need help in their fight for the right to education.
Gas attacks on girls’ schools are becoming more common. Poison gas is a low investment/ high yield method, meaning small amounts of inexpensive gas can be used to severely sicken tens of girls. In 2009 in Afghanistan, over one hundred female students were sickened with five girls so ill they slipped into comas. Others suffered dizziness, vomiting, and loss of consciousness. Taliban insurgents were blamed. Psychologically, girls in schools are on edge and quick to react to threats. At Totia High School, hundreds of Afghani girls were injured during a gas scare. Terrified girls ran from classrooms and jumped from windows in an attempt to evacuate the building. Forty-six girls were treated for gas poisoning; twenty-six were unconscious for over two hours. Perhaps the most physically and psychologically traumatic assault on girls in education is the acid attack. Sulfuric acid, usually thrown in the face, causes skin to melt, and sometimes dissolves the bones the melting skin uncovers. An attack of this nature takes a tremendous amount of time to physically heal. Indeed, the disfigurement, itself, can destroy a victim psychologically. Most women do not report an attack because they fear ostracism or further assault. Acid attacks were first noted in the 1990s when multiple women were assaulted in a short time span. In Afghanistan in 2008, fifteen girls on their way home from school were squirted with acid by assailants on motorbikes. At the Mirwais School for Girls in Afghanistan, acid thrown in one girl’s face caused such severe damage that she was sent to a clinic outside the country for treatment.
The gunmen are not crazy men off the street; they are soldiers, policemen, and warlords. Many answer directly to high-level government officials. If these are the perpetrators, who can the girls turn to for help? The first step to change is public awareness on the nature and scope of this problem. International attention often creates the pressure needed to make a government acknowledge a problem and begin making changes needed to protect and help victims. Small local activist organizations can make their voices heard to a government that is not listening by contacting larger human rights organization, such as UNICEF. Governments must make it clear that violence against women is unacceptable. These acts of brutality cannot be ignored; nations that have laws against such attacks must enforce them. Nations that have no laws protecting the victims and punishing the attackers must make them. Girls have the right to education regardless of religion or cultural beliefs. For the victims it is too late for, safe houses or institutions that can assist with the trauma of such violence helping to rehabilitate the survivors.
Jessica Anderson is an MA student in Anthropology at East Carolina University. She is also the Director of the Twilight Program in the Carteret County Schools.