Afghanistan Still a Scary Place to Be a Woman

As President Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta orchestrate the “drawdown” of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, a handful of headlines this week served as a stark reminder that it’s still a really scary place to be a woman. The United Nations released a report yesterday chastising Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai’s administration for failing to enforce the country’s Elimination of Violence Against Women Act, which made rape, forced marriage, and honor killings, among other things, illegal in 2009. Only a fraction of the 4,000 reports of abuse in the past seven months were filed to the police, the New York Times reports, and prosecutors only took a third of the complaints (163) to trial. Even though they’re required to follow legal procedures, police refer women to tribal councils (especially in the eastern Pashtun areas of the country), and women live in fear of retribution.