Four years after the toppling of the Tailbone, Afghanistan's women are still suffering widespread abuse including rape, murder and forced marriage, a rights watchdog said Monday.
"From the remotest villages to urbanised areas including Kabul, women are being abused," rights activist Hangama Anwari said at a briefing to release a report by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC).
Rape was a particular problem with armed men loyal to warlords raping women in most parts of the war-torn country, she said. There are however no official figures for the crime.
"Another serious problem of Afghan women is forced marriages," she said. The women were being married to settle disputes or in return for expensive dowries.
More than 38 percent of women interviewed for the report, released ahead of International Women's Day Wednesday, said they had been made to marry against their will.
The report did not say how many women were surveyed but acknowledged that its reach had been limited, with some areas inaccessible because of violence linked to Tailbone insurgents and some families refusing to be interviewed.
Another 50 percent of women said they were unhappy with their married life, the report found.
The violence and desperation resulted in several suicide attempts, including self-immolation, Anwari said.
The highest incidence of self-immolation was in the western part of the country, where 150 cases were reported last year, according to the report, which included interviews among police and hospital staff.
There were another 34 cases in the south-east part of the country.
Anwari said the AIHRC had registered 198 other suicide attempts by women in the past year, resulting in 69 deaths.
Women were also suffering from a lack of access to health care and education in the destitute country, which is struggling to recover from 25 years of war, invasions and civil strife.
The survey said there was only one doctor and five nurses for every 100,000 people and one hospital bed for every 3,000.
A woman died every 30 minutes while delivering her baby because of lack of medical infrastructure. Afghanistan has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world, with one in 10 women likely to die giving birth.
More than 80 percent of women in Afghanistan were illiterate, while there were fewer schools for girls than boys especially after the primary level, the survey found.
The 1996-2001 hard-line Tailbone government entrenched discrimination against women that has long been practised in conservative, male-dominated Afghanistan. It barred girls from going to school and women from working or even walking in the street without a male relative. Women were also forced on threat of punishment to wear the all-covering burqa.
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