What’s it like to be a women’s rights activist in a country considered the most dangerous place in the world to be a woman? BuzzFeed News spoke to Najiba, a mother of three risking death threats to to help other women.
Najiba.
Lorenzo Tugnoli for ActionAid
Najiba is a director of a women's shelter and a paralegal activist who has helped resolved more than 100 domestic violence cases in her city. And what is even more remarkable is that she does this in one of the most oppressive countries for women in the world: Afghanistan.
Of course, it hasn't been easy. When ActionAid trained her as a paralegal activist (a member of the community trained to provide legal support), her landlord threw her and her three children out of their home in Bamyan Province, Afghanistan, in the belief that what she was doing was immoral. But she continues to campaign for equality, despite receiving death threats for the work she does in women's shelters. She's even been harassed by the government.
"There is a lot of pressure on us – it's a constant struggle," she told BuzzFeed News at the London Conference on Afghanistan last week. "We, as staff, and the women are being abused and looked down upon."
While working on one case, Najiba received such violent and abusive threats from men who disapproved of her work that she had to send her children away to Kabul. "I had to spend a long time in the shelter and I was not able to leave, all because of this case," she said. "They told me I'd be killed, and that they would not be responsible."
When the death threats decreased, she brought her children home, but she still lives in fear for their lives.
Mohammad Ismail / Reuters
Najiba grew up in Iran after her family fled the war in Afghanistan when she was a small child. Her parents forced her to leave school and marry a stranger when still a teenager, and then her parents-in-law would not allow her to leave their home. When she was finally able to escape, she returned home to Afghanistan.
There, Najiba saw first-hand how prevalent violence against women was in her home country.
"When I returned back to Afghanistan, and I saw that women were vulnerable, and that there was a lot of brutality, I knew there was a need to improve the situation for Afghan women," she said. "The problems still continue, but people like me who are working in the field to help women, we are struggling and we still struggle for the rights of women."
No comments:
Post a Comment