From Kentucky to Kabul the war against women rages on

Screenshot from UN article on Afghanistan’s new ‘vice and virtue’ laws

Perhaps it is because I am the grandmother of two girls, both on the cusp of adolescence, but the plight of women and girls across the world haunts my thoughts more than ever before. Whether it is teenage girls in Malawi, denied a secondary education because their parents can’t afford the modest fees, or their peers in Afghanistan, denied even the right to show their face or use their voice in public, the world today seems a much more hostile place for women.

Rape is used as a weapon of war in mainland Europe as Russian soldiers use violent sexual assault to subjugate women. Shocking but perhaps not surprising, given that in Russia domestic violence has no legal definition. Here in the UK, despite legislative progress, women are as vulnerable to male violence as we have ever been. So far this year, 50 women have been allegedly killed by men, and a recent survey by Glasgow University showed that two-thirds of girls had been sexually harassed at school. The enthusiastic, unquestioning embrace of gender identity ideology by so-called progressives in recent years has undermined the very basis of women’s rights – our female sex.

And in the United States of America, where arguably second wave feminism began after the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, women’s hard-won rights, once seemingly invulnerable, have been exposed as all-too fragile.

Abortion ban for rape and incest

Hadley Duvall stunned the recent Democratic convention into silence when she told of her experience as a 12-year-old girl growing up in Kentucky. She said: “…I was an all American girl, varsity soccer captain, cheerleading captain, homecoming queen, and survivor.” A survivor of rape by her step-father, who impregnated her. Hadley was “lucky”. She had an abortion. In 2024, a 12-year-old girl raped by her father living in Kentucky – or Oklahoma or Texas or any one of nearly a dozen states where there is a total ban on abortion – would have to give birth to her own sister or brother. The Republican candidate for the presidency, Donald Trump, recently described the roll-out of abortion bans across states as a “beautiful thing to watch”. It is also worth reminding ourselves that only last year, a jury found Trump liable of sexual abuse and ordered him to pay $5 million compensation to his victim.

The Taliban’s recent ‘vice and virtue’ laws, which effectively strip Afghan women and girls of their most basic human rights, are, as journalist Zahira Joya described them earlier this week in a seminar hosted by the Amnesty Feminist network, a “full scale war against women” waged by “unchecked extremists”. The Taliban may try to justify their actions by quoting the Koran, but their sex apartheid is nothing to do with religious beliefs. They are simply evil misogynists. Men who hate and fear women so much that they feel compelled to imprison them in their own homes for fear of ‘temptation’.

As the campaigner Malala Yousafzai, herself a victim of extreme misogynist violence at the hands of the Taliban, said on social media this week, “For 3 years, the Taliban have showed us exactly who they are: misogynists who oppress girls and women.” She went on: “More than ever, Muslim countries and Muslim scholars alike must speak with a unified voice: the Taliban are distorting and misusing Islam to legitimise their oppressive system.”

The oppression of women

Throughout history, organised religion has been used as an excuse to oppress women. Our sexuality offended priests. Our bodies were considered unclean. Our voices too shrill. Our only role was as a mother, no matter the cost to our physical or mental health. Even today, women and men are separated in Orthodox synagogues, just as they are in mosques. And in America, it is a coalition of right-wing Christians – Protestants, evangelicals and Catholics – who have successfully destroyed the foundation of women’s sex-based rights: American women’s right to choose what happens to their bodies. This movement, which enthusiastically backs Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance, views abortion as a metaphor for the social progress that they believe has destroyed their vision of America. For abortion, read second wave feminism.

Three years ago, the women and girls of Afghanistan were able to go to school, study at university, become members of parliament, travel abroad, write poetry, establish businesses, vote. Article 22(2) of its 2004 Constitution provided that 'the citizens of Afghanistan – whether man or woman – have equal rights and duties before the law'. Today, those same women cannot even show their face in public.

A decade ago, a 12-year-old girl in Texas, raped and impregnated by her father, was able to get the medical treatment she needed for a safe termination. Today, in large swathes of America, a young girl raped by her father would be forced to give birth.

Misogyny has many guises. It hide behinds beards. Under surplices. In ancient texts and in contemporary culture. And in the key messages of a presidential campaign in the world’s most powerful country. 

As I watch my granddaughters learn to navigate a world where sexual violence is lionised on social media, images of women, their humanity hidden under black veils, are normalised, and a woman’s very identity as female is colonised by men, I realise, more in anger than sorrow, that women’s rights across the world are as vulnerable to misogyny as they ever were. The war against women is not over.

Screenshot: Abortion access across America by CNN

This article was first published in the Scotsman on 31 August 2024