Harassment All Around, Afghan Women Weigh Risks of Speaking Out
"Everyone thinks that those women who work outside the home are whores,
and Afghan men can say and do anything they want with them." Women in the media are particularly frequent victims, in part because they have public profiles, and often use social media with their real identities.
Read more via @Reuters | https://t.co/IwZuVzRg46 pic.twitter.com/nJqkYmdBEY Within only a few months, however, rumors began to circulate
that many women were complaining of sexual harassment at the station, and there was a wave of resignations, according to two women who said they were among those who quit because of that.
Emboldened by the uprising of women in America and Europe against sexual harassment, a few particularly courageous
Afghan women are speaking out, too, in the face of a problem long just accepted as commonplace and unsolvable.
"They think if they talk everyone will blame them,
and they’re right." Ms. Mehtar is one of the few Afghan women willing to name and shame her abusers, something most are afraid to do — and not just because of fear of public humiliation.
The harassment many of them face extends even to Afghan employees of international
and Western institutions, according to numerous women interviewed for this article.
The Afghan government has made some efforts to combat sexual harassment, which is widely seen as one of the main reasons the country has never been able to meet its goals to recruit female police officers
and soldiers, who are still less than 1 percent of the security forces.
When Ms. Mehtar posted on Facebook her view that "Afghan women are not safe even in their
own homes," she was deluged with a mixture of hate mail and sexually abusive comments.
