Afghanistan: Raising our voices for those who no longer have one

By Alessandro Gisotti

Imagine leaving your house tomorrow morning and, on your way to work, hearing only the sound of male voices in the street. The experience is even more uncanny because you meet women, as you did the day before, but none of them are speaking. At most, they whisper.

Imagine then passing through a park where a mother is cradling her baby to sleep. But she does so in silence, without singing a lullaby as she did the morning before, something we would expect to happen anywhere else in the world.
 

This scenario, worthy of a dystopian film or an Orwellian tale, is what is actually happening now in Afghanistan, where, by order, the Taliban have decided, overnight, that not only women’s faces and bodies, but even their voices no longer have “right of citizenship” in social life.

The news was picked up by the international media, but unfortunately, it did not get the coverage it deserved and – so far – has not aroused resounding protests and mass movements as it rightly does for so many other issues and civil battles.

Yet we should all be shocked and outraged at a decision like this, because mutilating a woman’s voice is an act of unprecedented violence that cannot fail to harm the entire human community, regardless of any religious, ethnic or cultural affiliation. If we are truly “members of one another”, as Pope Francis reminds us every day, then we cannot remain indifferent, because those little girls, those Afghan girls are our girls too. And we must raise our voices for them, who now no longer have that voice.

Just three years ago, on 31 August, American troops hastily completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban regained power. Since then, a nightmare has begun for the women of the Asian country, a nightmare that seems to have no end, but which at the same time was predictable: first the exclusion of girls over the age of 12 from schools (what could be more despicable than stealing the future of a generation?), then the gradual stripping away of all their fundamental rights.

And now even the cancellation of their voice in public. In a media landscape that is sometimes distracted by news that leaves no time to be wasted, we should all remember that millions of women have been forbidden to speak, forbidden to sing. Women who, in 2024, have had their voice taken away together with the hope of living in a better world.