On the third anniversary of the Taliban seizing power in Afghanistan, new data has been published that reveals how dangerous life still is for Afghan women.

Open-source investigators at the Centre of Information Resilience’s Afghan Witness project went through social media and news sites to find and record 332 reported cases of femicide since the US withdrawal of troops and the Taliban’s return to power on 15 August 2021.

This project is one of the first to try to collect and record data on the levels of physical and sexual violence against women in Afghanistan, particularly as the Taliban’s closure of independent media outlets and persecution of journalists has meant that it’s difficult to gather accurate data on the experiences of women in the country.

However, even this project’s findings are likely an underestimation of the true scale of violence inflicted on Afghan women.

The data found that 840 women and girls had experienced gendered violence from January 2022 to June this year, and in more than half of these cases, it was stated that Taliban officials were responsible for the violence. Afghan Witness investigators analysed crimes allegedly committed by the Taliban and found 115 cases of sexual violence, including incidents of forced marriage, slavery, assault and rape. Another 73 cases were incidents of non-sexual violence and torture.

In Afghanistan, women and girls have been blocked from accessing education, employment, attending gyms and prevented from accessing many public spaces.

In July 2023, the Taliban expanded its repression of the lives of Afghan women and ordered the closure of beauty salons in Afghanistan. Salons provided women with jobs, services and a community space to meet and connect with other women – spaces that are already hard to come by for Afghan women. It was estimated that these closures would result in a loss of around 60,000 jobs (the majority of which are women), cutting off their income and a way for them to be financially independent.

Earlier this year, Amnesty International said in a statement that gender apartheid – where it directly referenced Afghanistan – must be recognised as a crime under international law to “strengthen efforts to combat institutionalised regimes of systematic oppression and domination imposed on the grounds of gender”.

The concept of apartheid on the grounds of gender was first put forward into mainstream feminist discussions by Afghan women human rights activists and feminist allies in response to the subjugation of women and girls under the Taliban in the 1990s.

Hundreds of cases of femicide have been recorded in Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover in 2021