INTERVIEW-Afghan women seek to outlaw domestic violence
Source: Reuters
By Jon Hemming LONDON, Dec 13 (Reuters) - In Afghanistan it is perfectly legal for a man to beat up his wife, but more than five years after the fall of the hardline Taliban, a group of women parliamentarians is trying to change that. A United Nations report this year said violence against women in Afghanistan was "hugely under-reported" and "acts of violence against women are taking place with impunity". It also accused the government of not doing enough to prevent it. "We grew up with domestic violence without understanding that it is a crime," Shukria Barakzai, 34, an Afghan woman member of parliament, told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday during a visit to London. "We respected a husband's right to punish without any understanding that he hasn't got this right." Before U.S.-led forces overthrew the Taliban in 2001, the feisty Barakzai, from Kandahar in the turbulent south, defied a hardline Islamist ban and ran a girls' schools in secret. "That is my proudest achievement," she said. "I will fight for equality," Barakzai said. "I am talking about equal rights for access to education, for self-confidence, equal rights to chose a husband, to be more independent, to be more active, to be what we want to be in the future." The first step is a change in the law. "We are working on a law that can explain for the first time that violence against women is a crime," she said. TRADITION AND THREATS But Afghan attitudes to women are rooted in tradition. "We are living in a very traditional community and male dominated society ... child marriages, forced marriages are a tradition," said Barakzai, citing a recent case in which an 11-year-old girl was kidnapped and raped by a militia commander who then sent her family a dog and some cash as compensation. "A human being can be exchanged for an animal in my country, that's the sort of violence that we grew up with," she said. It may take years to change traditional attitudes, but even in parliament, where 68 of the 249 seats are reserved for women, opposition to the domestic violence bill is likely to be tough. "In parliament it is sometimes difficult for me because they never want women to talk a lot on different issues, but I try to explain to them that we are equal," said Barakzai. Some women deputies report male colleagues shouting "take her away and rape her" as they try to speak out. Barakzai said she receives many threatening letters and phone calls and narrowly escaped a bomb attack targeting her. Yet change, however slow, was coming, she said, and not just from government edicts issued in the capital Kabul. "The village women is more powerful than I am because now inside their houses they are fighting for their daughters to be educated," she said.
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