Suzanne Harrington: The Taliban are propelling women and girls back to the Dark Ages – Irish Examiner

If you ever feel useless, remember it took 20 years, trillions of dollars and four US presidents to replace the Taliban with the Taliban, posted some wag on Facebook, which I have shamelessly nicked for its neat summation.

It would be funny if it werent so utterly bloody awful; a whole generation of women and girls being forcibly propelled back to the Dark Ages, as countries like the US and UK bicker and capitulate.

In a study that will surprise no one, researchers at a Texas University compiled a list of practices associated with what the Economist tactfully calls pre-modern attitudes to women and links them to violence and instability. No shit.

As Hillary Clinton put it before the US elected an unhinged man rather than allowing someone with a vagina to be in charge The subjugation of women is a threat to the common security of our world.

It should not take actual research from an actual university to join the dots between such pre-modernism sexist family law, lack of education for girls, forced and/or underage marriage for girls, lack of reproductive rights, lack of property rights, lack of inheritance rights, polygamy, dowries, killing female babies in preference for sons, lack of legal consequence for male violence and rape and failed states.

(That the research came from Texas, itself in the grips of its very own legislative Taliban, gun-totin Republicans banging on about foetal heartbeat, is the kind of irony that would make you want to run amok with garden shears).

You dont need to be a sociologist, anthropologist, or any other kind of ologist to work out that skewed sex ratios result in grave social imbalance. That misogynist cultural practices passed off as traditional like marrying your daughters off when still children do nobody any favours, as they perpetuate cycles of ignorance, violence, poverty. Like Malala says, what most frightens extremists is a girl with a book; extremists across the globe prefer instead to keep girls pregnant, cowed, voiceless, isolated.

Yet this myopic misogyny does not serve anyone. Not the men, not the women, not the children of states who continue to exclude and oppress half of their citizenship. During global peace talks between 1992 and 2019, women made up just 6% of signatories and 13% of negotiators. Never mind ideas like culture or tradition what about pragmatism? Peace talks that involve women last longer. Countries, where women are part of the organisational structure, are less violent. These are facts, not opinions.

Listening to the former Afghan Minister for Women, Hasina Safi on BBC radio the other day shed fled for her life as the Taliban abolished her ministry was heartbreaking. Why do we still allow the routine trashing of half of humanity in so many places? How can this still be happening?

And what can we do about it, without involving more bombs? Because if humanity is to ever survive its own death wish, we need women at the table. End of.

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Suzanne Harrington: The Taliban are propelling women and girls back to the Dark Ages - Irish Examiner