UN Women said Afghanistan has issued more than 100 decrees targeting women and girls five years after the Taliban takeover in August 2021. The data shows a tightening system that has pushed women farther from public life, with movement, education, employment, justice systems, and healthcare all caught inside the same restrictions.
Half of Afghan women interviewed now leave home only once or twice a month because of severe limits on movement and access to public spaces. More than half of women say they leave home twice a month or less, and nearly three-quarters of women told UN Women that they feel unsafe leaving home without a male guardian, or mahram.
UN Women data on Afghanistan
New UN Women data places the latest restrictions alongside a longer legal shift. In 2026, decree no. 12 abolishes legal equality between men and women before the law, places husbands in a position of legal authority over their wives, and criminalizes violence within marriage only when it results in severe, visible physical injuries. In 2026, decree no. 18 makes it significantly harder for a woman to leave a marriage, preserves men’s unilateral right to divorce, and implicitly permits child marriage.
The same data says the exclusion of women and girls from education, employment, public life, justice systems, and healthcare intensified in the past year. UN Women describes the result as a system in which rights are removed by rule, then narrowed again by enforcement.
Movement, surveillance, enforcement
Thousands of men and women with wide-ranging powers to detain people are involved in a growing system of surveillance and enforcement. That matters because restrictions in Afghanistan are not limited to written decrees; they are carried into daily life through people who can stop, question, or detain women and girls as they move through public spaces.
Seven in ten women now describe their mental health as bad or very bad, and Afghanistan already has one of the world’s highest maternal mortality rates. In 2024, Afghanistan had an estimated 638 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, a figure that sits alongside the shrinking access to healthcare described by UN Women.
Women and girls in daily life
More than half of women say they avoid public spaces such as markets and health facilities altogether. The pattern leaves ordinary tasks compressed into rare trips outside the home, and it leaves many women navigating daily life under rules that have become normal over five years rather than exceptional for one season.
UN Women says the crisis has become normalized after five years of Taliban rule, and the source frames the situation as a global outlier with no parallel in the modern world. For women and girls in Afghanistan, the next hard question is how the 2026 decrees are being enforced in daily life across Afghanistan, because the legal text is already in place and the pressure on movement and access is already visible.
