In this special collaborative episode of We Don’t Talk About That, host Linda Coogan Byrne steps back and the show is led by guest Sangeeta Kalsi, development editor at Fourth Wave Feminist Magazine, to mark five years since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan.
Our special guests are Afghan journalist Zahra Joya, founder and editor-in-chief of Rukhshana Media, and Akriti Saraswat, Protection Officer for Safety and Gender at Free Press Unlimited.
Zahra founded Rukhshana Media to ensure that the lives of Afghan women were documented by Afghan women. Now working from exile, she leads a team of female journalists who continue reporting from inside Afghanistan, often secretly and at enormous personal risk.
Akriti works internationally to protect journalists facing violence, persecution, displacement and gender-based threats and speaks about what meaningful support must look like when physical safety is only one part of survival.
Together, they discuss what five years of Taliban rule have meant for women and girls, the systematic erasure of women from education, employment and public life, the dangers faced by female journalists, exile, trauma and the international community’s failure to hold the Taliban accountable.
This is a conversation about journalism, resistance and what happens when women’s rights are treated as negotiable. Above all, it is a call to listen to Afghan women, support their work and use the freedoms we still possess to demand political action.
How you can help support Afghan women:
Listeners can also contact their elected representatives and foreign ministers and ask their governments to publicly recognise Taliban rule as a system of gender apartheid, support its codification as a crime against humanity and refuse any political normalisation of the Taliban that abandons Afghan women and girls.
This episode contains discussion of gender-based violence, persecution and trauma.
Follow We Don’t Talk About That for future conversations exploring culture, equality, power and the stories we are too often told not to discuss.
","author_name":"Linda Coogan Byrne"}