Sitting cross-legged on blue velour cushions on the living room floor, the women of the self-help brigade sip green tea, nibble on sugar cookies and report the week’s news from the neighbourhood.
It is mostly grim. A despondent neighbour abused by her father-in-law is threatening to kill herself. The man whose young wife suspected him of taking drugs has beaten her up and abandoned her. A husband is demanding more money than his wife can afford before he will agree to a divorce.
Sunshine pours in the windows. A squat black oil heater, all that furnishes the spare carpeted room, glows with warmth. The women frown over the stories, nod their heads in commiseration and plot how to intervene.
Perhaps a visit and some gentle reasoning with a recalcitrant husband might work in one case. Shuttle diplomacy between feuding families could help in another. A particularly bitter inheritance dispute, pitting a destitute widow against her hostile in-laws, may have to be referred to court.
Gatherings like this one, part consciousness-raising session and part group hug, take place weekly in some of the poorest areas of the capital. About 11,000 women participate in 650 small groups organized just two years ago under the auspices of the international aid group, CARE.
They are part of a larger effort by judges, lawyers and human-rights activists to give women a voice in a justice system that now rarely hears or sees them.
In the seven years since Afghanistan adopted a constitution and set up a parliament, the country has put in place laws establishing equal rights and outlawing violence against women. Yet laws alone have changed little for the vast majority of women who must still rely on the good will of male relatives, rather than the formal legal system, to claim those rights.
In most parts of the country, the boundaries of an Afghan woman’s life is still set by men: what she wears, at what age she marries, whether she can go to a doctor when she’s ill, if she gets the inheritance she is due, and how much violence she is made to bear.
If she dares to object, men also are the arbiters. Civil courts and religious courts, both administered by the government to deal with family matters, do operate in a few parts of the country.
But most Afghans – by tradition, preference or mistrust of government – still use parallel informal systems of home-based justice. When there are domestic conflicts to settle or punishment to be meted out, most often they are decided within the family circle or in ad-hoc councils of male elders called ‘jirgas.’
So to effect real change in their lives, many Afghan women say they need to work with that informal system by educating and standing up for each other, house by house and street by street.
“In Afghanistan, it’s useless to leave it to men to talk about women’s rights because they think only in terms of how they can benefit,” said Shahla Farid, a human-rights law professor at Kabul University. “The other approach is for women to learn from each other and fight for their rights. It’s far from widespread, but we are seeing some results.”
The formal justice system, in any case, is badly broken after years of war followed by brutal Taliban rule and now a raging insurgency across much of the country. Only six of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces have a functioning family court.
The family court in Kabul, a city with an estimated population of 4.5 million, is supposed to handle cases involving divorce, alimony, child support and custody disputes. Yet it gets just 350 cases a year.
Afghans, both women and men, prefer to try to resolve conflicts first “within the matrix of the family,” said Rahima Rasai, the court’s chief judge.
