Double Betrayal: Abuses against Afghan Policewomen, Past and Present

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Human Rights Watch, 10 October 2024

The latest Afghanistan-related report by the US-based human rights organisationis based on 24 interviews with women who were police during the previous government. They spoke both about their experiences under the former government and since the Taliban takeover.

During the former, Western-backed government, policewomen were facing the stigma attached to the Afghan police as an unreformed institution that “continued to function along militia-patronage networks” linked to organised crime, such as drug smuggling, and corrupt as well as “a perception in conservative communities that women working [not only] as police were sexually promiscuous.” Many experienced “sexual assault…, including rape, … and harassment by their male supervisors and counterparts in the police, a problem never officially faced before 2021. HRW reports: “Former policewomen have described systemic abuse, including frequent demands from superiors for sex in exchange for promotion, desirable posts, or avoiding dismissal from jobs. Complaints systems failed to provide any means of redress.”

This situation, however, widely known and played into the hand of the Taleban which were able to project the government also as morally corrupt.

HRW further says:

All women employed under the former government as civil servants, including those in the police, lost their jobs when the Taliban took power. While the Taliban ordered some policewomen to return to work in selected areas including searching women at checkpoints and guarding female prisoners, the majority have struggled to find alternative income because in order to disguise their identity, they moved to areas where they have few networks or support. (…)

Since the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021, Taliban authorities have threatened Afghan women who had served in the police under the previous government. As Taliban forces carried out hundreds of revenge killings of men who had served in the former government’s security forces, many former policewomen went into hiding out of fear of being identified.

The HRW report also points to another failure of the erstwhile Western donor countries:

… only a small number of former policewomen who have fled Afghanistan have been resettled in the US, Canada, or any of the European countries that promoted and funded the recruitment and training of Afghan women police after 2002.