Jennifer O'Connell
speaker
2,353 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 5d ago
Jennifer O'Connell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
She says there's been no official schools for students, female students beyond sixth grade.
And then she had this line in the column about while thousands of religious schools have been established across Afghanistan where girls may attend without restrictions.
And to me, that sounded totally grossly naively, like maybe that was a slight liberalisation of the no education for women policy.
But then I looked into these religious schools.
There's 21,000 of them.
They're Islamic religious schools or madrasas.
And they're basically set up to inculcate women into the Taliban's way of thinking.
If you don't want your daughter to go, if you live there and you have a daughter of that school age or a girl herself chooses not to go, they will face isolation and hunger.
And those who comply, they face a terrible choice because if they comply and send their teenage daughters, they find that their daughters come back much more rigid and critical in their thinking.
And that's the whole point of them.
Yeah, I mean, the syllabus is pretty narrow.
Like they memorize the Koran and they talk about the Taliban's interpretation of Islamic law and gender roles.
And that's about the size of it.
So the girls often come back then and kind of take their parents to task for being infidels.
And then the knock-on effect of that is that girls who are still allowed to attend primary school, proper primary school, where they would have been getting an education, are falling away from that and are going to the madrasa younger and younger.
And, you know, if you want to have a chance of getting a job in Afghanistan as a woman, now that's your only chance because the jobs are prioritised for girls who are graduates of the madrasa.
It's really appalling.
They're excluded from the job market.
They're left in poverty.
We've spoken about this in this programme before, but there are bans on women becoming doctors, which means that maternal mortality has skyrocketed.
Showing 1561–1580 of 2,353 · page 79 of 118
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