A report on the state of women’s lives in Afghanistan:

Between 60 and 80 per cent of all marriages in Afghanistan are forced. As many as 57 per cent of girls are married off below the age of 16, some as young as six. Because of the custom of paying a bride price, marriage is essentially a financial transaction, and girls a commodity.
The custom of baad, when girls and women are exchanged to settle debts and disputes, is still widely practised. The women are not treated as proper wives, but in effect are slave workers for their husbands.
…The Taliban were vilified for denying girls education, but even now only 19 per cent of Afghan schools are for girls and only 5 per cent of girls of secondary school age are enrolled.
And the West cannot blame the Taliban, as many of the abuses take place in the north and west, where the Taliban are not active.
In the north-east, where the Taliban never had control, a woman dies every 20 minutes in childbirth.

(By the NGO Womankind Worldwide).

Ayaan Hirsi Ali writing in The Sunday Times:

For a while now I have been asserting that the most effective way for EU governments to deal with their Muslim minorities is to empower the Muslim women living within their borders.
The best tool for that is education. Yet the education systems of some EU countries are going through a crisis of neglect, particularly with regard to immigrant children. And in the matter of faith schools we are now paying the price of mixing education with ideology.
I think religion is taking up far too much time, attention and space in our society. Blair needs to look at the segregation of boys and girls and ask himself why young girls in primary schools are veiled. Are we saying that five and six-year-olds are sexual symbols, “uncovered meat”? As a society we must understand that saving young girls from all kinds of repression is important.

In Nicaragua, to WIN church backing, politicians have passed a law banning all abortions – including those in the case of ectopic pregnancies, which cannot produce a baby but will kill the woman.

Nice to see the Catholic Church’s view of the value of half of the human race laid out so clearly.

A Ramadan sermon (as reported) in Sydney, on the subject of rape:

“If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it … whose fault is it, the cats’ or the uncovered meat,” he said.
“The uncovered meat is the problem.
“If she was in her room, in her home, in her hajib (Islamic headdress), no problem would have occurred.”

Or of course if you kept all the males locked up, there wouldn’t be a problem. No, I’m not suggesting that, but it would be equally logical.

Anna, a journalist, is looking for …

“for a committed feminist (however that is defined for them) who has someone in their family – e.g. a dad or brother -who has perhaps more traditionally patriarchal views – to interview them both for a broadsheet about the issues and challenges of having two strong sets of opinions within a family unit. Interviews would take around 25 minutes on the phone, and interviewees would also need to be photographed. If you can help please email Anna on annamj@mac.com or call her on 07957 454881.”

I said I’d pass the message on, but please contact her about it, not me. Thanks!