Taliban excludes women from parks, gyms and outdoor amusement facilities

The Taliban has banned women from gyms, parks and outdoor amusement facilities in the movement’s latest round of restrictions on women’s rights and freedoms in Afghanistan.

Taliban vice and virtue ministry spokesman Mohammed Akef Mohajer said the organisation “tried its best” for 15 months to avoid closing parks and gyms for women, ordering separate days of the week for male and female use or imposing gender segregation. “But, unfortunately, the orders were not obeyed and the rules were violated” as men and women were seen in parks together and the rule for wearing the hijab was not observed.

Taliban teams have been deployed to ensure women do not enter prohibited places. Children who have gone to parks with their mothers have been turned away. According to Al-Jazeera: “The Ferris wheel and most of the other rides in Zazai Park – which offers a spectacular view of Kabul city – have ground to a sudden halt because of a lack of business.” Before the ban hundreds of women and children and families visited the park on a daily basis.

The edict mainly targets poor women and children whose sole recreation had been strolling in parks and enjoying amusement parks. Affluent women have been barred from taking physical exercise in the only place where they had access.

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Since assuming power at the end of August 2021, the Taliban has ordered women to wear clothing which conceals them in public. Girls have been excluded from middle school and high school. Women already in universities have been segregated from men and forced to take religious studies.

Women have been largely barred from employment, apart from teaching, nursing, or serving as doctors to girls and women. The Taliban has had to allow some women to train as nurses and doctors to treat women.

Before the Taliban was ousted in 2001, 5,000 girls were enrolled in school. When the Taliban returned two decades later, about 3.8 million women (38 per cent) were students. Women comprised nearly 22 per cent of the workforce in 2019 but that fell to 14.85 in 2021, according to the World Bank.

The UN special representative for women in Afghanistan, Alison Davidian, condemned the ban. “This is yet another example of the Taliban’s continued and systematic erasure of women from public life,” she said. “We call on the Taliban to reinstate all rights and freedoms for women and girls.”

The international community has made reversal of the Taliban’s exclusion of girls and women a condition for providing aid and unfreezing assets held abroad which could end Afghanistan’s economic crisis and relieve 50 per cent of the population suffering acute poverty and hunger.