Her Afghanistan: When Words Become Walls

  • Decree 01

    The first entry of a new series reads the Taliban’s 2024 Vice and Virtue Law, the decree that declared a woman’s voice must be hidden.

    Sienna Park

  • So What Can We Do?

    There is no single remedy to end online abuse of Afghan women, but four kinds of response measurably reduce its harm: personal digital safety, organized counter-speech, platform reform, and networks women build for one another. So far, this series has followed the abuse step by step. It has examined what the abuse looks like, what…

    Sienna Park

  • Who Gets Targeted the Most?

    The previous entry in this series discussed how online abuse written in Dari and Pashto slips past the regulation systems. So who gets targeted the most? Profession matters, but so do ethnicity, location, and political history, and above all, their “outspokenness.” Afghan Witness, the open-source investigation project run by the UK-based Center for Information Resilience,…

    Sienna Park

  • The Moderation Gap

    Much of the abuse aimed at Afghan women online stays up because the systems built to remove it cannot fully read it. The previous entry in this series examined what online hate speech costs Afghan women: deleted accounts, abandoned work, and voices withdrawn from public life. That raises an obvious question. If platforms prohibit harassment…

    Sienna Park

  • The Cost of Speaking Up

    Hate speech against Afghan women is not only a set of words. It is a price attached to being seen, and many women are paying it by being silenced. How the abuse arrives After the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, street protests were often suppressed. Social media, especially X, became one of the…

    Sienna Park

  • Hate Speech Online and Offline

    We are not new to hate speech, but the rooms it happens in have changed. For most of history, a slur had to be spoken face-to-face, shouted across a street, or printed on a flyer. Today, the same words can be typed in seconds, seen by thousands, and shared with millions. It is tempting to…

    Sienna Park

  • Hate Speech Against Afghan Girls

    Since the fall of Kabul in 2021, Afghan girls and women have been barred from secondary school and university and pushed out of most public life; they are not allowed to enter the workforce or, to be realistic, even to set foot outside their homes without a man. So what is there left to do?…

    Sienna Park

  • Are You Going Or Not?

    My mother laid out my red shoes, the ones with the buckle. She said, tomorrow wear the good ones. I thought that meant we were going somewhere nice. She packed a bag and then she took things out of the bag and then she packed it again. Three times. My father stood in the doorway…

    Sienna Park