Afghan President Hamid Karzai has backed a statement from the country's top religious body calling for stronger restrictions on women's freedoms.
On March 2, the Ulema Council issued a statement saying that men and women should not mix in the workplace or schools and that women must always be accompanied by a male relative when they travel.
More than 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, women in many parts of Georgia have become more outspoken on gender issues. But in Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge, a three-kilometer-wide, 30-kilometer-long valley that borders Russia, change is complicated.
When she was 16, Kibriyo Khaitova’s parents told her that if she didn’t marry, she’d soon be a spinster. So, like many girls from Tajikistan, Khaitova married a man her family found for her. Now 20, she has two children, no husband and is fending for herself.
Armenia’s high rate of male births is alarming international and Armenian pre-natal specialists. Their chief concern is that selective abortions are contributing to a demographically undesirable gender imbalance.
At the age of 14, Kifayat Mammadova was married and already an expectant mother. A year and a half later, her marriage had failed, her child had died, and she was on the road to Baku from her village in the mountains of southern Azerbaijan in search of a new life.
After suffering years of physical abuse at the hands of her husband, a beating in the street was the last straw for 43-year-old Shamsigul Khulova. Her humiliation prompted her to leave her husband of 18 years, the father of her six children. But to her alarm, authorities would not recognize a divorce, thus threatening to deny her a property and custody settlement.
More than nine years after Taliban militants were driven from power in Kabul, women in Afghanistan are making slow but steady progress in their effort to secure basic rights.
The issue of domestic violence, long a taboo topic in Armenia, is generating lots of public debate these days. The catalyst for discussion is a shocking criminal case, in which a 20-year-old mother of a toddler was, according to witnesses, abused to death by her husband.
