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

  • 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