Systematic Conflict-Related Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in Afghanistan Under Gender Apartheid
Conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) has persisted across Afghanistan’s wars and successive political regimes, but its widespread and strategic use as an instrument of violence and political control has rarely been documented, investigated, or prosecuted, except the annual CRSV reports from the United Nations that document a small number of cases investigated and verified against U.N. human rights standards. Under the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, acts including rape, sexual slavery, and forced pregnancy may constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity, or acts of genocide. It was only in 2008 that the U.N. Security Council recognized that sexual violence can be used as a tactic of war and constitutes a threat to international peace and security.
International legal recognition has done little to render these crimes visible or accountable in Afghanistan. Stigma, fear of retaliation, and institutional impunity continue to shape what can be reported, by whom, and at what risk. The Taliban’s return to power in August 2021 reinstituted and consolidated a gender apartheid system that restricts women’s human rights, bans women-led organizations and independent media, and has dismantled legal and human rights protections that can respond to this violence. Moreover, barriers to international monitoring have removed what limited avenues once existed through which conflict-related sexual violence could be reported and investigated. The resulting documentation gap compounds the violence and impunity by creating the political and institutional conditions that conceal them. The lack of data on sexual and gender-based violence under Taliban rule should not be mistaken for a lack of abuse; rather, it reflects the extremely difficult conditions for reporting, documenting, and seeking justice in Afghanistan.
In the context of CRSV, systematic violence refers to patterns of abuse made possible and sustained through the organization of Taliban power: decrees that remove women’s rights, coercive administrative practices, detention, surveillance and an institutional order in which perpetrators face no meaningful accountability. These practices operate within the Taliban’s gender apartheid system of governance: an institutionalized system of gender-based domination that segregates women and girls; excludes them from political, economic and social life; and subjects their movement, education, work, and bodies to Taliban control. Within such a system, CRSV is neither exceptional nor separable from other forms of gendered violence. It forms part of a continuum of coercion used to enforce women’s subordination, consolidate Taliban authority, and silence resistance. Afghanistan shows that territorial consolidation has not ended CRSV. Instead, it has transformed tactical sexual violence into gendered structural violence that is embedded and enforced by Taliban governance.
International engagements that avoid politically explicit recognition of gender apartheid risk perpetuating silence and impunity for CRSV. Policymakers should recognize and confront gender apartheid as a causal and enabling condition of CRSV. Accountability mechanisms must be context sensitive, but this sensitivity should not justify violence based on cultural exception or be an excuse for inaction. International responses should prioritize justice and visibility while directly supporting Afghan women and local actors who document, respond to, and resist such violence.
Conflict-Related Sexual Violence
Since the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, sexual and gender-based crimes being perpetrated in Afghanistan are best understood as systematic as well as conflict-related. The emphasis on systematic is important because Afghanistan is increasingly treated in a post-conflict context, where the reduction in active armed hostilities risks placing continuing sexual violence outside conventional understandings of CRSV. Yet the violence has not disappeared with the change in the character of the conflict; it is increasingly embedded within and enabled by a system of gender apartheid imposed and enforced through Taliban rule.
The concept of systematic CRSV therefore helps capture the nature, organization, and continuity of this violence beyond incidents directly linked to active hostilities. Systematic CRSV is defined by recurring patterns of sexual violence that are produced, enabled and concealed through organized structures of gendered power, coercion, and impunity, rather than by the number of reported incidents or evidence of a central command. The Murad Code is a voluntary code of conduct that addresses gathering and using information about systematic conflict-related sexual violence (SCRSV). It centers the experiences of victim-survivors at the heart of this work. SCRSV and gender-based violence (GBV) recognizes that these are built into the way the Taliban govern: It is enabled by their decrees and practices that allow abuse to continue without consequences, enforced through policy and state violence, and sustained by the absence of accountability mechanisms.
Following their return to power in August 2021, the Taliban dismantled all existing, albeit weak, national protection mechanisms for women experiencing sexual and gender-based violence. Under Taliban law, rape and domestic violence receive no legal recognition. Instead, the de facto authorities govern through a rigid and punitive interpretation of shariah. Women’s testimony is deemed insufficient in court, while an allegation of sexual violence may itself be treated as evidence of illicit sex (zina). If a woman is accused of zina, she faces imprisonment and corporal punishment, including public flogging. Thus, reporting sexual violence turns into a further source of danger: a woman seeking justice may instead face suspicion, detention, or punishment. The legal risk is, therefore, shifted from the perpetrator to the survivor, deterring disclosure, closing avenues for redress, and ensuring that sexual violence remains hidden and unpunished.
That is why reporting rape has become difficult, and by extension, creating an inaccurate narrative that underestimates the extent of the crime. The U.N. secretary-general’s 2026 report on conflict-related sexual violence emphasizes that widespread impunity, fear of reprisals, and severe restrictions on monitoring have significantly constrained the documentation of SGBV under Taliban rule. In 2025, UNAMA, the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, verified incidents involving 15 women and six girls, including rape, gang rape, and forced marriage, implicating de facto Taliban officials and unidentified perpetrators. The reports also confirm that Taliban officials have committed rape, sexual violence in detention, and other forms of sexual abuse against women perceived to have violated or challenged discriminatory Taliban rule. Given severe constraints on access to protection and reporting institutions, the verified cases of CRSV represent only a small fraction of the actual prevalence of these international crimes.
These findings are significant. They constitute the U.N.’s official documentation and verification of conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence (CRSGBV) under Taliban rule, according to the standards of international criminal law. However, this recognition of systematic CRSGBV has not been accompanied by U.N. or official analysis of the structural and political causes and consequences of the violence. This analytical gap is the product of chronic underreporting driven by individual and community stigma, fear of reprisals, and institutional collapse under Taliban rule. The limited engagement of international organizations with identity-based political violence has also contributed to the lack of knowledge and action to prevent CRSGBV. Local reporting shows that the Taliban use SGBV as a tool of gender and ethnic oppression, particularly against minority and other vulnerable women.
Understanding the dynamics of systematic CRSGBV as a result of the Taliban’s consolidation of a gender apartheid system requires looking beyond verified reports and individual incidents. Under Taliban rule, sexual and gender-based violence is acceptable: Practices such as forced and child marriage and punishment of wives and daughters are socially sanctioned and justified as religious discipline and purported “protection” of women. These practices embed violence within a system of moral governance that reinforces impunity for sexual and gender-based crimes.
A participant in the authors’ research recalled Taliban officials telling men, “If the women are not listening to you, introduce them to us. Then we will train them how to listen to you.” Thus, SGBV is part of a system that removes women’s legal personhood and perpetuates gender apartheid.
The denial of women’s legal personhood is especially visible in the institutions that the Taliban claim are designed to protect women. The Taliban have named provincial gender-segregated detention centers in Afghanistan “Women’s Protection Centers,” reframing detention as protection. Firsthand accounts from an international human rights organization that had been granted limited access to one of the centers for humanitarian purposes described an environment of acute vulnerability: overcrowded cells, women detained alongside young children, and the absence of confidential complaint mechanisms or legal counsel. She explained that “access was tightly controlled, conversations monitored, and documentation restricted, severely limiting independent oversight and reporting.” Visits revealed that many women were detained not for criminal offenses but for seeking refuge from abuse or were refugees returning from Iran without a male guardian, effectively criminalizing survival. The risks within these spaces extend to sexual violence.
Investigative reporting based on testimonies from former women detainees has documented allegations of sexual assault, forced undressing, sexualized abuse, and other forms of sexual violence by Taliban personnel in detention facilities, suggesting that spaces described as providing women with “protection” may themselves expose women to further gender-based violence. These centers function as extensions of the broader system of gender apartheid, where protection is reconfigured as confinement. For women who had already escaped violence, the result is reversal of meaningful protection: Seeking safety can lead to their detention, while detention itself may expose the women to further violence. Here, women’s agency is systematically denied, and avenues for accountability and rights-based justice are largely absent.
International Responses to the Gender Apartheid System
Afghanistan’s harmful domestic dynamics are compounded by shortcomings in international responses. International legal and humanitarian frameworks provide limited practical tools for addressing the systematic CRSV and GBV produced and sustained by Taliban ideology, ethnic hierarchies, and enforced community silence. While instruments such as the Rome Statute and U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325 (the Women, Peace and Security agenda) are normatively important, they are often operationalized through neutral and technocratic approaches that prioritize state-centric protection mechanisms and conventional armed conflict. This approach completely avoids the political question of gender apartheid. International responses have also often prioritized humanitarian access, political stability, and continued engagement with the Taliban, while justice, accountability, and women’s rights have remained secondary. As a result, many organizations working in Afghanistan have failed to recognize or respond to SGBV as a systematic and political pattern of abuse. Their reluctance to confront patriarchal power structures, both within Afghan society and in international institutions, has reinforced the stigma and silence.
The limitations of international humanitarian and legal frameworks are reflected in serious omissions and misperceptions in international documentation. For example, the All-Survivors Project report on survivor-centered healthcare response to the male victim-survivors of sexual violence in Afghanistan presents responses to CRSV and GBV as though they operate within a functioning and legitimate public system. It notes “Family Protection Centers,” which are clinics established during the republic era located within government provincial and regional hospitals to provide survivors with medical care, psychosocial support, legal assistance, evidence collection, and referral services. However, this framing portrays Taliban-controlled institutions as neutral public service providers, neglecting to contextualize how these institutions operate within a system of gender apartheid that constrains access to justice as well as access to health, especially for women and girls, and creates widespread stigma for victim-survivors of CRSGBV.
Conflict Dynamics and Sexual and Gender-Based Violence
This chart distills the findings of a recent comprehensive study that develops seven hypotheses on the dynamics of conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence, exploring the relationship between conflict intensity, territorial control, reporting conditions, and the visibility of violence across global regions. Its relevance to Afghanistan lies in its attention to state-led and low-intensity violence, rather than treating large-scale armed conflict as the only context in which CRSV occurs. Applying these propositions to Afghanistan provides a useful framework for understanding how patterns of systematic conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence has evolved before and after the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021. The Afghanistan case both confirms and extends several of these theoretical expectations of CRSV patterns.
| Finding/Hypothesis | Afghanistan 2021-2026 | Evidence from Taliban Context |
| Sexual and gender-based violence precedes peaks in conflict violence | Strongly reflected | Increased forced marriage and sexual threats during Taliban offensives prior to territorial collapse |
| Subnational context shapes reporting | Very strongly reflected | Urban-rural divide and near-total silence (no official reporting) in Taliban-controlled areas |
| Press freedom facilitates reporting | Reflected – now reversed | Repression of media and NGO access post-2021 |
| Postconflict reporting increases | Not reflected | Taliban victory produced reporting collapse – indicating ongoing conflict situation for women and girls |
| Nonstate actor sexual and gender-based violence reports are rare | Strongly reflected | Documented Taliban abuses represent tip of iceberg |
| International engagement facilitates reporting | Strongly reflected – now weak | UNAMA and NGOs enabled monitoring; withdrawal dismantled mechanisms |
| More sexual and gender-based violence during territorial acquisition | Clearly reflected | Tactical sexual and gender-based violence during offensives; structural and systematic sexual and gender-based violence post-takeover |
The trajectory of systematic conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence in Afghanistan both confirms and extends the conflict dynamics identified in the global study. First, the Afghan case supports the finding that sexual and gender-based violence intensifies during periods of territorial contestation. Before the 2021 military takeover, this involved fighting between the Taliban and Afghan Republic forces for control of districts and provincial centers as the Taliban expanded its territorial reach. During the Taliban’s military offensives prior to August 2021, forced marriage, sexual threats, and other forms of coercive violence were increasingly documented as communities came under Taliban control.
Second, Afghanistan strongly demonstrates that subnational political contexts shape both the occurrence and visibility of CRSGBV. Prior to the Taliban’s return, documentation was concentrated in urban centers where media, women’s organizations, and international actors operated, while Taliban-controlled districts remained largely inaccessible. Following the Taliban takeover, this regional pattern has become national in scope, transforming Afghanistan into a nonpermissive environment for independent or civil society documentation.
Third, the Afghan case illustrates the central importance of press freedom and humanitarian access for documenting systematic conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence. Rather than generating greater reporting after conflict, the Taliban’s consolidation of power dismantled the institutional and social conditions that made reporting possible, reversing a pattern often assumed in post-conflict settings. The de facto authority has attacked journalists and closed news organizations that had provided critical information on Taliban acts of violence.
Fourth, Afghanistan challenges the expectation that post conflict environments produce increased reporting of sexual and gender-based violence. Instead, authoritarian consolidation has produced a collapse in documentation and investigation despite growing evidence that violence continues in public and private spheres.
Fifth, consistent with the study’s observations in Syria and Myanmar, documented abuses by nonstate armed actors likely represent only a visible fraction of a much larger pattern, particularly where fear, repression, and restricted access constrain survivor disclosure.
Sixth, the withdrawal of international actors after 2021 demonstrates that international engagement is vital to prevent systematic conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence since the absence of international actors has enabled the dismantling of most protection mechanisms as well as documentation, monitoring, and referral pathways even if they were previously weak.
Finally, Afghanistan both confirms and extends existing theory by demonstrating that while tactical conflict-related sexual violence may decline after territorial consolidation, it can evolve into structural violence embedded within a system of governance. Unlike in Syria and Myanmar, where CRSV largely remains associated with military operations, the Taliban has institutionalized gender-based violence through a system of gender apartheid. This shift from tactical wartime violence to institutionalized gender oppression suggests that existing theories of conflict-related sexual violence should account not only for violence committed during armed conflict, but also for its continuation through systems of authoritarian governance after military victory with grave inequalities increasing the risk for the recurrence of conflict.
Conclusion
Sexual and gender-based violence under Taliban rule is systematic and related to the post-conflict situation in Afghanistan. The Taliban disregards international law including universal principles of human rights, directly and indirectly through its consolidation of gender apartheid. Impunity for this violence is sustained through the repression of women’s rights, ethnic inequalities, and the dismantling of previously available protection and accountability mechanisms. Accordingly, addressing systematic conflict-related sexual violence should move beyond standard incident-based reporting to examine how this violence is embedded within Taliban governance, ideology, and everyday systems of control. While international responses have focused on humanitarian protection and legal documentation, they have paid insufficient attention to the structural and political dynamics that enable and perpetuate sexual and gender-based violence against women and girls. Recognizing the systematic nature of this violence under gender apartheid should inform ethical documentation, effective accountability and context-specific action that centers support and empowerment for survivors in Afghanistan.
Recommendations
- Humanitarian health organizations operating in Afghanistan should build secure internal systems to identify recurring patterns of sexual violence, rather than treating each disclosure as an isolated case. Information stripped of identifying characteristics should guide survivor referrals and independent monitoring without exposing survivors or being shared with Taliban authorities. Sexual and reproductive health care access for women and girls is vital for the prevention of CRSV and the response to it.
- The UNAMA and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights should examine CRSV as part of the Taliban’s system of gender apartheid, connecting reported cases to the institutionalization of decrees, detention, and forced marriage and the suppression of reporting. This would make systematic patterns visible and prevent the low numbers of verified cases from being mistakenly identified as an indication of limited violence.
- States engaging bilaterally and/or multilaterally with the Taliban to enable humanitarian access should ensure that access does not become a justification for political silence or normalization. As conditions for humanitarian support, they should protect life-saving assistance and require independent monitoring, access for women-led organizations, and direct support for Afghan survivor services and documentation.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and not an official policy or position of New Lines Institute.
Photo: Afghan community members gather in downtown Toronto, Canada, on August 15, 2026, to mark five years since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan. Demonstrators called attention to restrictions on women’s rights and education and urged the international community not to recognize the Taliban government. (Photo by Sayed Najafizada/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
