Online abuse and hate speech targeting politically active women in Afghanistan has significantly increased since the Taliban took over the country in Aug. 2021, according to a report released Monday by a U.K.-based rights group.
Afghan Witness—an open-source project run by the nonprofit Center for Information Resilience—says it found that abusive posts tripled, a 217 percent increase, between June and December 2021 and the same period of 2022.
The report said the team of investigators "collected and analyzed over 78,000 posts" written in Dari and Pashto—two local Afghan languages—directed at "almost 100 accounts of politically active Afghan women."
The interviews indicated that the spread of abusive posts online helped make the women targets, the report's authors said. The interviewees reported receiving messages with pornographic material, as well as threats of sexual violence and death.
The report identified four general themes in the abusive posts: accusations of promiscuity, the belief that politically active women violated cultural and religious norms, allegations the women were agents of the West, and accusations of making false claims in order to seek asylum abroad.
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