MAR 29, 2024 JLM 63°F 07:38 AM 12:38 AM EST
Battered Afghan Women and Divided Loyalties

Back in the day, I could only work with battered women for a short while, after which I burned out. I continued to raise money and consciousness for the shelters and for the shelter movement but I was not saintly enough to keep working with a battered woman who insisted upon returning to her batterer again and again.

Many feminists did so for as long as it took for those poor women to finally side with themselves against the men who were breaking their bones. Many women finally left for the sake of their children, not to save themselves.

And now – I want to say this carefully – we are running into a similar problem with our educated, spirited, even heroic Afghan women. Most will not leave without their families. Women, like men, internalize tribal psychology and cannot conceive of living without being enmeshed in a family network.

Many Afghan women rather admirably feel responsible for both younger siblings and for ailing or disabled parents, especially if they have endangered them by their own feminist activism. According to the women with whom I'm currently in touch, the Taliban are hunting down precisely such women in house-to-house raids. It is feared that they will kill whomever has been left behind.

Just as the first wave of mainly male interpreters brought their families with them, so, too, have Afghan women brought their husbands, brothers, and fathers along with them.

Here's the problem. These men treat "their" women as if they were all still in Kabul, Herat, or Kandahar. The women, who've been rescued by those involved in what I've called a "digital Dunkirk," are now somewhere in Europe or America, in hotels, apartments, and in small houses. The women are being verbally demeaned, hit, threatened, ordered about, and forced into domestic servitude by their men.

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