Afghanistan to the UK: Institutional Persecution to Institutional Failure
Kanako Mita, Sawako Utsumi, and Lee Jay Walker
Modern Tokyo Times
The United Nations stated unequivocally in 2024 that women fleeing domestic violence in Afghanistan were being incarcerated—not as offenders, but ostensibly for their “protection.” Since then, conditions for Afghan women and girls have deteriorated further. By 2026, their lives remain constrained by an increasingly rigid framework of governance rooted in extreme interpretations of Sharia law, severely restricting education, employment, movement, and legal autonomy.
The Afghan crisis is not isolated. In Iran, young women have lost their lives at the hands of the so-called “morality police,” victims of state-enforced dress codes upheld by political and religious elites. In Yemen, child marriage continues to rob girls of their childhood and future. In Pakistan, non-Muslim girls from Christian, Hindu, and Sikh communities still face forced conversions and marriages — abuses repeatedly condemned by the United Nations.
Taken together, these realities reveal a disturbing pattern: where extremist ideologies or rigid legal structures prevail, women and girls are often the first to lose their rights, dignity, and safety.
A UN fact-finding report warned: “The confinement of women in prison facilities, outside the enforcement of criminal law, and for the purpose of ensuring their protection from gender-based violence, would amount to an arbitrary deprivation of liberty.”
Violence against women in Afghanistan predates the Taliban’s return to power. Estimates once suggested that up to 90 percent of Afghan women experienced physical or psychological abuse during their lifetime. With legal protections now largely dismantled, the vulnerability of women and girls has become even more acute.
Violence against women, however, is a global failure rather than a problem confined to one culture or region. In the United Kingdom, rape conviction rates remain low, prosecutions related to female genital mutilation are rare, and the (mainly Pakistani Muslim) grooming-gang scandals that victimized countless numbers of working-class British girls exposed profound institutional, political, and policing failures.
Yet a crucial distinction remains. In Britain, these failures stem from institutional weakness, political caution, or failures of enforcement tied to neglect on a scale that is beyond understanding (the political class also downplayed the crisis because it didn’t fit the racist victim card model). In Afghanistan, Iran, and similar states, the persecution of women is embedded within government policy and actively enforced by the authorities themselves.
The scale of the Afghan tragedy is underscored by investigative reporting. Afghan Witness documented 188 cases of violence against women across Afghanistan within an eighteen-month period, including beheadings, shootings, stabbings, and bodies discarded in public spaces, often bearing signs of torture or suffocation. The United Nations has similarly warned that mechanisms for legal protection and redress have “all but disappeared” since the Taliban takeover.
The UN also expressed alarm that some de facto officials viewed women’s prisons as places of “protection” for abuse survivors. Meanwhile, girls remain barred from education beyond the sixth grade, and women face severe restrictions on travel without a male guardian.
Violence against women demands universal resolve. Yet where governments actively institutionalize repression — or knowingly tolerate it — the international community bears a heightened moral responsibility to respond with clarity and consistency. Protecting women and girls is not a cultural preference but a fundamental measure of justice, humanity, and the rule of law.
The suffering of women and girls — whether through state repression or institutional failure — demands moral consistency rather than selective outrage. In Afghanistan, state power is openly deployed to restrict, punish, and silence women. In the United Kingdom, the failures are less overt but still damaging, as legal inertia and political caution too often leave vulnerable women and girls inadequately protected.
The international community must therefore move beyond expressions of concern and pursue sustained accountability: challenging laws that degrade women, strengthening protections for victims, and refusing to excuse abuse under the guise of culture, tradition, or political expediency.
The measure of any society lies not in its rhetoric but in how it protects its most vulnerable. Until women and girls can live free from fear — whether in Kabul, London, or elsewhere — the promise of justice remains unfulfilled.
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