In recent years, several countries—including Croatia, Malta, and others—have recognized femicide as a distinct crime. The Italian government and parliament also took this step, acknowledging that killing a woman solely because of her gender is not just homicide, but a crime rooted in gender-based violence. These legislative shifts are historic because they name what was previously invisible: the killing of women not as ordinary homicide, but as targeted, gender-based violence.

Recognition of femicide—defined as the intentional killing of women because they are women—ensures the crime is named, defined, and tracked separately from general homicide. By acknowledging the gendered motive behind such violence, which is often erased when treated as ordinary murder, recognition strengthens accountability by compelling governments to collect data, reform laws, and craft prevention policies specifically aimed at stopping gender-based killings.

This framework of recognition—naming gender-based violence for what it is—has profound implications for how the world should respond to the ongoing crisis facing Afghan women.

Afghanistan: From Gender Apartheid to Gender Persecution

Since the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021, the situation for women has been marked by unprecedented restrictions and violations of human rights. Several legal terms have been debated in describing the plight of Afghan women. Activists, lawyers, and advocates have pushed for recognition of gender apartheid—a system of exclusion and control that denies women basic rights and freedoms simply because of their gender. Experts adopted this term because the situation of women and girls in Afghanistan resembles the situation in South Africa under racial apartheid.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for senior Taliban leaders because their systematic repression of Afghan women and girls—banning them from education, work, public life, and freedom of movement—amounts to gender persecution, a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute. This marked the first time the ICC has pursued charges of gender persecution on such a scale.

These are important steps, but none of these terms fully captures the danger Afghan women face. Terms like “gender persecution” and “gender apartheid,” while legally significant, remain abstract—and the word “gender” itself can obscure the fact that these policies target women and girls specifically, systematically, and lethally. I believe the situation amounts to something even more severe. The Taliban’s rules and restrictions systematically erase women from public life, family life, and every space of survival. Women are banned from education, work, and freedom, leaving them with no opportunities to live with dignity.

The Emergence of Femi-Genocide

This is where the international debate has begun to catch up. In her report to the Human Rights Council at its fifty-ninth session (June–July 2025), Ms. Reem Alsaleem, the Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, introduced the term “femi-genocide” to describe the deliberate targeting of women and girls for destruction, in whole or in part.

By situating the Taliban’s systematic erasure of Afghan women within the framework of the Genocide Convention, the Special Rapporteur underscored that these acts are not merely crimes against humanity but rise to the level of genocidal intent. As her report noted, “Women have been confined to virtual house arrest, fostering a mental health crisis with high rates of depression and suicide.” The Rapporteur argued that ‘females in today’s Afghanistan could qualify as a national group under article 2 of the Convention, given the flexible and undefined scope of the term in its travaux préparatoires.’

This recognition strengthens the argument that Afghan women and girls, as a distinct collective within the nation, are being subjected to policies designed to annihilate their existence—both physically and psychologically. The acts documented in Afghanistan map directly onto the Genocide Convention’s enumerated crimes: causing serious bodily and mental harm; deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction; and imposing measures that prevent births through denial of maternal healthcare.

What the Taliban have constructed is not a set of isolated human rights violations but a system designed to eliminate Afghan women from existence—socially, psychologically, and physically. This is not violence by rogue actors or failures of enforcement. It is state policy, uniformly imposed, with the explicit aim of erasing women from Afghan society.

The Consequences Are Devastating

Healthcare Restrictions

Taliban policies on hijab and mahram—requiring women to have a male chaperone—are killing women. Women are forbidden from seeing doctors without a male guardian present, yet many households are headed by widows whose husbands died fighting the Taliban over the past two decades. These women have no male relative to accompany them. In some provinces, doctors and nurses are reportedly banned from treating women who arrive alone.

Natural Disasters

Natural disasters magnify these policies. When a devastating earthquake struck Kunar province in September 2025, hundreds of women and girls died—not only from the disaster itself, but from Taliban restrictions. Injured women remained trapped under rubble because male rescuers were forbidden from touching them. There were no female doctors or rescue teams, and fear of punishment kept help away. Some women reportedly refused to flee collapsing homes because they were not wearing a hijab. When survival itself becomes a crime, death is inevitable.

Compulsory Burqa

The compulsory burqa is also deadly. Earlier this month, a pregnant woman arriving at a hospital on the outskirts of Herat was turned away by Taliban guards because she was not wearing one. She had already undergone two cesarean sections and needed a third. Denied entry and left waiting outside the gate, she suffered a uterine rupture. By the time her family transported her by rickshaw to the provincial maternity hospital, it was too late: her baby died, and she remains in a vegetative state in intensive care.

The Mental Health Crisis

Erasing women and girls from public life—taking away every freedom, right, and opportunity—is itself a form of killing. Research shows a surge in suicide among female students who were banned from schools and universities. Women and girls face increasing domestic violence, leading to suicidal ideation.

Behind these statistics are individual women whose lives have been shattered.

I recently spoke with Yasmin, a 23-year-old woman who was a medical student before the ban on higher education for women. She has been struggling with suicidal thoughts. Yasmin was born into a family where both parents are illiterate and sons were valued more than daughters. She spent her life working hard with the dream of becoming a doctor—to prove to her family that she has value, even though she is a girl.

The closure of universities shattered that dream. She had always imagined her parents glowing with pride at a daughter who became a doctor. Now, she sees herself as a burden. Her family’s economic situation is dire, and she has been deprived of education, work, and income. “I wish I weren’t a girl,” she told me. “I wish I could help my father as a son.” All of this has led her to wrestle with suicidal thoughts.

We must also remember Abida, a 20-year-old woman in Afghanistan’s central Ghor province who died after setting herself on fire to escape a forced marriage to the brother of a Taliban member, according to KabulNow. Abida’s story is one among thousands of tragedies happening every day—yet almost none are heard.

Call for Recognition and Action

Women and girls are the wealth of our country. In the two decades before the Taliban took over, resources, opportunity, and time were invested in each of them. The world must not ignore Afghan women and their suffering, allowing them to die this way.

Legal terminology alone is not enough; the reality is that the Taliban are killing women.

This must be explicitly recognized and urgently stopped. Even if they are not shooting women directly, their policies achieve the same result: they drive women into despair, stripping them of hope and dignity, until many are forced to end their own lives.

This is not simply discrimination—it is femi-genocide, and the world must recognize it as such.

The author of this article, an Afghan legal scholar, cannot presently be identified due to security concerns.