WUNRN
AFGHANISTAN - WOMEN MARCH AGAINST
STREET SEXUAL HARRASSMENT
Una Moore - July 15, 2011
Kabul, Afghanistan – Holding signs that read “This
street belongs to me too”; “We won’t tolerate insults anymore”; and a banner
with a verse from the Koran emphasizing the wrongness of abusing women, around
30 young Afghan women and men marched in the sweltering afternoon heat to
protest the rampant and often violent sexual harassment of women and girls on
Kabul’s streets.
The
demonstration was the first of its kind in Afghanistan.
Though
small in size, its message was clear and, in Afghanistan’s extremely
conservative public space, incendiary: street harassment is an attack on
women’s right to coexist in society with men, and it must end.
Composed
mainly of members of two local youth organizations and including several men,
the demonstrators marched from the gates of Kabul University, a notorious
hangout for harassers, to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission
about half a mile away.
Passing
through bustling streets full of food vendors and shoppers, they handed out
leaflets urging their fellow Afghans to recognize the cruelty of harassing
women and take action in their everyday lives to counter the abuse around them.
Keenly
aware of their country’s history of peaceful demonstrations turning bloody, the
organizers had initially feared violence from male opponents and hostile
members of law enforcement.
Police
officers stayed close to the column of demonstrators throughout the march and,
in a welcome departure from recent public protests, the demonstration proceeded
without interruption and concluded peacefully.
The
newly-formed feminist group Young Women for Change received online messages of
solidarity from fellow anti-harassment activists as far away as Slovenia and
Yemen, as well as an outpouring of encouragement from women elsewhere in
Afghanistan and in the Afghan diaspora.
Flanked
by members of the Afghan and international press, the marchers knew their
message would be carried to a far wider audience than the thousands who
witnessed their protest firsthand.
The
organizers hoped the deluge of media coverage would ignite a public discussion
of the problem of sexual harassment and encourage more young Afghans, including
men, to join the nascent movement to make their country’s streets safe for
women.
“This
is only the beginning,” one participant said afterward. “We have more actions
planned.”