All girls’s magnificence salons in Afghanistan had been set to shut on Tuesday, officers mentioned, as a part of a Taliban administration announcement early this month that the women-only areas had been forbidden below Shariah legislation and induced financial hardship for grooms’ households throughout wedding ceremony celebrations.
The closing of the salons — one of many few public locations left in Afghanistan the place girls might congregate exterior the house — represents one other grim milestone for ladies’s rights in Afghanistan. Since the Taliban seized energy in August 2021, the federal government has steadily rolled again girls’s rights, barring girls and women from most public areas, from touring any vital distance with no male family member and from attending college past sixth grade.
The salons had been given a one-month grace interval to finish their operations.
Taliban safety forces in Kabul, the capital, made the rounds on Tuesday to make sure that salons had been complying with the ban, based on Sadeq Akif Muhajir, the spokesman for the Taliban administration’s Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.
The preliminary announcement ordering salons to shut prompted a uncommon public protest early this month in Kabul, the capital, the place dozens of salon homeowners and beauticians marched down the road whereas holding indicators opposing the ban. Security forces with the Taliban administration broke up the protest utilizing hearth hoses and shot weapons into the air to disperse the group.
The use of drive drew criticism from the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, which tweeted that “Afghans have the right to express views free from violence. De facto authorities must uphold this.”
For many ladies in Kabul, magnificence salons have been cherished as one among a handful of protected areas the place girls might collect away from males exterior the house.
Shukriya Afshar, 46, has labored as a beautician within the Gul Raihan Beauty Salon in Kabul for 2 years. She mentioned that her husband earned just some {dollars} every week as a day laborer and that the cash from the salon was essential to supplementing the household’s revenue.
The work additionally supplied her a badly wanted mental-health outlet as she watched her rights erode below the Taliban administration.
“I could get away from anxiety and mental pressure by going to the salon and working,” she mentioned.
Previous Taliban edicts have restricted girls from most employment alternatives exterior well being care and personal companies, and about 60,000 girls had been employed by roughly 12,000 salons throughout Afghanistan, based on the Afghanistan Women Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
“This isn’t about getting your hair and nails done,” Heather Barr, the affiliate director of ladies’s rights at Human Rights Watch, mentioned in a press release. “This is about 60,000 women losing their jobs. This is about women losing one of the only places they could go for community and support.”
Such restrictions have additionally drawn widespread worldwide condemnation, together with from different Islamist governments like these of Iran and Saudi Arabia, and prompted worldwide human rights screens to label Afghanistan probably the most restrictive international locations on the planet for ladies.
“Women and girls in Afghanistan are experiencing severe discrimination that may amount to gender persecution — a crime against humanity,” Richard Bennett, the United Nations particular rapporteur for Afghanistan, mentioned in a press release final month. “The de facto authorities appear to be governing by systemic discrimination with the intention to subject women and girls to total domination.”
Safiullah Padshah contributed reporting.
Source: www.nytimes.com