Afghan women start campaign to publicly use names
Get real time updates directly on you device, subscribe now.
(Web Desk) – Afghan women are becoming part of a campaign to have their names heard in public. In Afghanistan it is considered unseemly for a women’s name to be uttered in public and can even be taken as an insult. Generally women are only referred to by the relationship they hold to the eldest male in the family for example as the mother, daughter or sister of the said man.
However now according to BBC, Afghan women’s rights activists are trying to get this trend changed by using a social media campaign called #WhereIsMyName.Over the past few days the campaign has gained traction and #WhereIsMyName has been used more than a 1000 times.
Bahar Sohaili, who is involved in , told the New York Times that the campaign was simply a spark to make the Afghan women question the current state of affairs and ask why their identity was being denied to them. She also stated that the reality was that women in Afghanistan “also remain silent — they don’t protest this.”
Still that silence may be changing. Najla, a supporter of the campaign from Kabul, said that the superstitious tradition of not using women’s names had been inherited from older generations and even men who obeyed it only did so because they had heard it from their elders.
Tahmina, another supporter form Kabul, stated that “I am a woman and a human being before being someone’s mother, someone’s sister, someone’s daughter or someone’s wife,”. She also said that she was really tired of being called by someone else’s name everywhere and it was a painful experience for her.
The campaign has attracted the support of famous personalities such as the popular Afghani musician Farhad Darya who shared a photo of himself with his wife. Although Farhad mentioned in his post that he receives negative reactions from crowds whenever he says the name of his wife or mother, the comments underneath his post were mostly positive.
Women rights are slowly improving in Afghanistan although females still suffer from problems such as a lack of education and difficulty in entering the workforce.
