From School to Marriage: The Unchosen Path of Afghan Girls

While this year’s 16 Days of Activism campaign focuses on gender-based violence online, the reality for women and girls in Afghanistan extends far beyond the internet. Since the Taliban regained power, violence and restrictions against women have risen to unprecedented levels.  The impact of these restrictions on women and girls has been so severe that, at times, it has forced them into making painfully difficult choices.

The Rights Monitor Media will cover the campaign by sharing news, reports, personal stories, and reflections from Afghan women and girls, highlighting their experiences with violence and restrictions.

With the return of the Taliban to power in August 2021, the trajectory of millions of Afghan girls shifted abruptly. Aspirations of becoming doctors, professors, lawyers, or journalists collided with a new reality: locked gates, altered family expectations, and a shrinking definition of what a young woman was allowed to be: marriage.

Elnaz, 26, had spent years building a path in medicine.

“My biggest goal was to open a clinic and teach at the university,” she says.

That trajectory collapsed when the Taliban closed women’s universities in December 2022—just as she was approaching graduation. Overnight, the years she had invested lost professional meaning. Employers dismissed her applications: without an officially recognized degree, she had no place in the medical sector.

“I felt empty,” she says. “I kept working practically, but without income. Everywhere I applied, the answer was the same: no diploma, no job.”

The loss of education didn’t just interrupt her career; it rearranged the expectations around her. Marriage, once a personal choice, hardened into the only socially acceptable route.

“I had built my life around medicine, but in a moment, it was gone. All my plans, all my work, vanished,” she says. “I wanted to stay at least in the medical environment and gain experiences.”

Trying to salvage a piece of her identity, she enrolled in a nursing institute. That hope lasted until December 2024, when the Taliban shut down medical institutes for women as well. The last door to formal medical training closed.

Now spending her days at home caring for her child, Elnaz says: “I never imagined all my effort would end in sweeping, peeling vegetables, and childcare. The Elnaz with dreams no longer exists. I just hope my daughter doesn’t share my fate.”

While Elnaz’s dreams were dismantled at the finish line, Sonia, 20, saw hers crash before she could reach university. Before the Taliban, she was a tenth-grade student who imagined a straightforward path: graduate school, enter university, study management.

“I always told my family I wouldn’t marry early. I wanted to study and work,” she says.

But when the Taliban banned girls’ schooling above grade six in 2021—making Afghanistan the only country in the world with such a ban—her plans evaporated instantly. Families recalculated their daughters’ futures around marriage; without schooling, keeping a girl at home became socially unjustifiable.

“When school closed, my family said it wasn’t appropriate for a young girl to stay at her father’s home,” she says. “Relatives asked, ‘If you’re not studying, what will you do?’ Before, I had an answer. After the closure, I didn’t.”

Within a year, she was married. Today, she is the mother of a three-year-old.

“I went straight from the school desk to my husband’s home,” she says. “When I see little girls going to school, I wish I were seven again.”

Maryam, 25, had nearly completed her law and political science degree before the Taliban closed universities. Married with consent and supported by her husband—also a law graduate—she imagined a joint professional future.

“I dreamed of joining the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I believed my future was mine to build.”

But the Taliban’s restrictions destroyed that vision. She managed to finish her degree under Taliban rule—“barely,” she says. On the very days she defended her thesis, the ban was enacted.

“I had the diploma, but what could I do with it? I left it in a corner so it wouldn’t remind me of what I lost,” she says. “Even if I wanted to work, where could I go? Under the Taliban, no legal office is allowed to hire a woman.”

Today, she spends most of her days at home caring for her child.

"Nothing remains of me to have a dream for myself. My life is entirely limited to my child and home."

The experiences of Elnaz, Sonia, and Maryam reflect a broader reality for millions of Afghan girls. Under Taliban rule, education has not simply been restricted—it has been structurally dismantled. Career pathways collapsed; marriage became the default expectation; professional identities dissolved into domestic routines.

Their stories illustrate a single trajectory: when education disappears, choice disappears with it.