A recent survey by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) found that 50,000 Afghan windows in Kabul prefer suicide to overcome the hardships they continue to face. Quoting research by the underground women’s right organization the Revolutionary Association of the Women in Afghanistan (RAWA), UNIFEM says that “as many as 25,000 Afghan women worked as prostitutes in 2001” and that “the number will rise as women and girls resort to selling themselves to escape poverty.”
With diminishing opportunities to earn a decent livelihood and under pressure to care for their families in a high-inflation scenario, the condition of widows, especially those living in Kabul is terrible and many have already committed suicide. Discriminated against, abused by husbands and male partners, and sexually abused, Afghani women also face physical and mental torture from other women.
UNIFEM says that the average life span of women in Afghanistan is 20 and child and maternal mortality is at 1,600 to 1,900 per 100,000 at childbirth due to conditions that are easily solvable.
