379: What Happens to Women's Rights When There Are No Consequences?

episode

Ending Human Trafficking not yet transcribed

▲ 0

Transcript

This episode hasn't been transcribed yet Upvotes decide what gets transcribed next — 0 so far. Sign in to upvote

More from Ending Human Trafficking

376: Why Documents Decide Who Traffickers Can Exploit Next 35 min · 27 Jul 2026

375: Is It Ever Ethical to Photograph a Trafficking Survivor? 44 min · 13 Jul 2026

374: How Illicit Massage Parlors Really Launder Their Money 31 min · 29 Jun 2026

372: How Traffickers Use TikTok the Same Way Brands Do 30 min · 01 Jun 2026

All episodes from Ending Human Trafficking →

Report any issue

Source

Recorded14 Sep 2026

Publisherendinghumantrafficking.org ↗

Handlerec:20369744

Show notes

Zahra Nader joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to discuss why, for nearly every five women killed in Afghanistan by their own families, only one man is ever arrested, and how a newsroom of journalists writing under pseudonyms is building the record no one else is keeping.Chapters(00:00) - Why Afghanistan Is the Battleground for Women's Rights (02:07) - Founding a Newsroom in Exile (08:23) - How Zan Times Protects Its Journalists (11:59) - Child Marriage and the Laws That Enable It (19:22) - The Collapse of Maternity Care (24:53) - Afghanistan as a Global Bellwether (29:20) - Femicide, Impunity, and the Zan Times Fellowship (31:35) - What Listeners Can Do About Zahra NaderZahra Nader is the founder and editor-in-chief of Zan Times, a women-led newsroom in exile reporting on human rights violations in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. She began her journalism career in Kabul in 2011, and in 2016 joined the New York Times bureau there, becoming the first Afghan woman to work with mainstream Western media inside the country. She moved to Canada in 2017 for graduate study and was still a doctoral student in gender and women's studies at York University when the Taliban retook Afghanistan in August 2021. She founded Zan Times in August 2022 with $30,000 she had saved to build a home in Kabul, and now runs it from Edmonton alongside a network of journalists who report from inside Afghanistan under pseudonyms. She briefed the UN Security Council in October 2022, and was a 2024–2025 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, where she studied sustainable funding models for exiled newsrooms.Key Points• Five years of Afghan women losing basic rights with no international consequence lowers the floor for what can be denied to women anywhere. International law has not prevented it, and that is the precedent that travels.• A newsroom reporting under an authoritarian regime protects people by compartmenting them. Zan Times journalists inside Afghanistan publish under pseudonyms, connect only to an editor, and do not know each other, so one arrest cannot expose the rest.• The Taliban's Code on Judicial Separation of Spouses removes any minimum marriage age. A father or grandfather can give a child into marriage without her consent, at any age.• School was the brake on early marriage, and it is gone. Parents used to defer marriage until a daughter finished school; with girls out of classrooms, Zan Times found families selling one-year-olds and two-year-olds for future marriage to settle debts.• The penalties encode the asymmetry. A man who beats his wife to visible injury, a broken bone, serves 15 days if she can prove it in court. A woman who goes to her parents and refuses to return, along with her parents, serves 3 months. Sandie converts it on air: 90 days against 15.• The 2025 US funding cut closed 445 clinics and hospitals and cut more than 3 million people off from healthcare. Rural women lost the mobile teams that were their only access to a midwife or a blood pressure check.• Restrictions push women out of healthcare even where they are still permitted to work. A Kandahar midwife supporting three children and a paralyzed father paid half her salary to a distant relative to pose as her brother, then stopped going in when the Taliban started asking for ID.• The countermeasure is documentation. Zan Times' femicide investigation across 10 provinces found roughly one arrest for every five women killed by a family member, with deaths certified as suicide despite visible signs of abuse. Subscribing to the newsletter at zantimes.com is the step the episode asks for.Resources• Zan Times• 'When she turns eight they will take her': rising number of Afghan girls being sold into child marriage• 'I don't know how to save my daughter from her husband': the brutal reality of the Taliban's new marriage law• Inside the deadly collapse of maternity care in Afghanistan• 'Her face was beaten in': how Taliban rule ushered in a new era of women being killed• Statement by Zahra Nader at the UN Security Council Open Debate on Women, Peace and Security (NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security)

Ask this episode

“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.