“When Home Is No Longer Safe”: Domestic Violence in Afghanistan Under Taliban Rule

Hosna, 28, had stepped out last Tuesday to deliver some clothes and pick up new fabric. When she returned, her husband was waiting in the courtyard. “He asked where I had been. I answered,” she recalls. That brief exchange quickly turned violent, though Hosna was all too familiar with such scenes.

Even though her husband knew she had gone out only for work, he beat her. This time, the excuse was a simple touch of makeup. “I had lipstick on,” Hosna says. “He kept hitting me and asking who I had done my makeup for.” The beating left her with a broken right hand.

Hosna had spent years working as a hairdresser, but after the Taliban returned to power, women’s salons were shut down. For the past two years, she has made a living sewing, yet even this work she cannot do freely.

“My husband doesn’t let me work outside the home,” she explains. “He brings the fabric, I sew at home, and he keeps the money. He decides how everything is spent.”

Under the previous government, Hosna’s husband had been a member of the security forces. After its fall, he lost his job and turned to drugs. Since then, tension and violence have become a constant part of Hosna’s life. “Ever since he became unemployed and started using opium, there hasn’t been a single peaceful day at home,” she says. “If we spend ten Afghanis on household needs, he spends a hundred on drugs. It’s like he takes out his anger on me for everything.”

For the past two weeks, Hosna has been unable to work. Her family has come to see her, but their response has been neither supportive nor protective. They told her there is nothing they can do and that she must “accept her fate.”

Hosna has tried multiple times to report her husband, but in the absence of supportive institutions, her complaints have gone nowhere. “I don’t know what will become of me,” she says. “I don’t know anywhere to go for help, and I have no one. If I get a divorce, I have nowhere to go; if I don’t, I’ll be beaten every day.”

Violence against women in Afghanistan is not new, but since the Taliban returned to power, it has become more widespread and blatant. With the Ministry of Women’s Affairs dissolved and support mechanisms removed, domestic violence has shifted from a punishable crime to an everyday reality with no accountability—a reality that unfolds behind closed doors and is often dismissed as a ‘family matter.’