Street Harassment: Daily Violence against Afghan Women

Shabana Stanekzai

Street harassment exists almost everywhere in the world and Afghanistan is no exception. According to a research by Women and Children Legal Research Foundation, nine out of ten women and girls in urban communities in Afghanistan face harassment. Every woman’s experiences vary depending on the distance she travels or her time on the streets, but she can face up to 20 incidents of verbal or physical harassment or inappropriate stares and disturbances from male pedestrians. This is a form of gender-based violence. Verbal harassment and behaviors such as teasing, taunting, whistling, winking, touching women’s bodies, and sexual abuse of women are just different forms of violence against women.

A few days ago I watched as two teenage boys who were barely 11 or 12 years old harassed a woman in her late 30s. The woman started yelling and eventually the boys got afraid and ran away but not until she told the boys to be ashamed of their behavior and learn to respect women. The entire time, I was trying to comprehend how two young boys got the courage to disturb this adult woman in public.

Street harassment has many cultural, social, economic and moral factors. One of the common causes of such bad behavior in our country is that people feel entitled to judge others based on their own beliefs. Invasion of individual privacy in this country is considered normal. Often people speak behind others, comment on their personal matters, and criticize what one wears and how one lives as if these are all common and normal behaviors, forgetting that these are all invasion of one’s privacy. People often feel that they can judge a woman’s character based on their own narrow-minded definitions of how she should behave. In a male-dominated society like Afghanistan, the power dynamics between men and women make it possible for these judgement to lead to violence against women.

I have noticed that some men think that women enjoy the taunts and teasing. One reason for this misunderstanding is that these men are unaware of the psychological impact of their behavior on women. Many men think that by teasing and taunting women, they will build a relationship with women and that women enjoy these displays of attention in men. In reality, verbal and physical harassment marginalized women from society, causes them anxiety and pushes them into depression while creating feelings of fear and distrust towards all men.

Though some men, naively, use taunting in misplaced hopes of building relationships, most use it as a tactic to feel powerful. Taunting and harassing women in the street is the manifestations of masculinity in society. Men who harass do so to show control over a female body and the public space.

Dealing with street harassment

I have noticed that the majority of women around me prefer to remain silent when facing street harassment, but is silence an appropriate response? As we have noticed in recent years, silence in most cases only strengthens and intensifies violence against women. Harassers wrongfully assume that women who are silent in the face of street harassment, are consenting to these acts or they are not strong enough to defend themselves. This, in itself, boosts the harasser’s confidence who continues to stalk and abuse women without fear of repercussions. But we can’t blame women for being silent. There are many reasons why we choose silence.

Unfortunately, the structure of society, social institutions, and our education system are built in a way that always suppress women. If a woman defends herself against street harassment, her clothes, her behavior, and her makeup will be judged instead of focusing on the fact that she was disrespected. Most of the time, the men who harass women are immediately pronounced not-guilty and the women are insulted and blamed further by the community. As a result, women prefer to stay silent when facing street harassment so they are not blamed and considered a “bad” woman. Women are silent, because in our communities, first and foremost, we blame women themselves. In this society, people believe that what a woman wears results in her harassment. But the reality is that women with Hijab, without Hijab, with makeup or without makeup, are all harassed and abused. In order for women to raise their voices against the injustice that they face, we need to make sure that they are not blamed for men’s behavior. The best way to eliminate harassment is to create greater awareness. Both women and men need to be aware of women’s rights as citizens and as people. Men and the society as a whole need to shift their view of women from seeing us as objects to seeing us as equal human beings.

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Read this piece in Persian here.

This piece was translated to English by Maryam Laly. A volunteer for Free Women Writers, Maryam is passionate about human rights issues. She has a degree in Government with minors in Peace Studies and Arabic from St. Lawrence University.