The Taliban’s 2025 penal code has attracted international condemnation for permitting domestic violence as long as it leaves no broken bones or open wounds. The response, however, misses a deeper point. The law does not introduce a new reality for Afghan women; it formalises one that already existed. It builds on a social order in which violence was already embedded and, by recognising it in law, closes off pathways for change.
This reality is visible in available data. Afghanistan’s Demographic and Health Survey, conducted under a government that had ratified international conventions on women’s rights, found that 50.8 percent women reported physical or sexual violence by a husband or partner. This was the baseline under a state formally committed to gender equality.
The Internalisation of Violence
More troubling was the internalisation of violence. Women who accepted more justifications for wife-beating were also more likely to have experienced it. The rate was 54 percent among those accepting one or two reasons and 56.7 percent among those accepting three or four.
This relationship points to a feedback loop in which exposure and acceptance reinforce each other. Education was the one consistent protective factor: violence fell from 53.6 percent among women with no schooling to 27.4 percent among those with higher education. Among husbands who sometimes got drunk, the rate reached 96.6 percent, compared to 50.6 percent for non-drinkers. Employment offered no protection. Women working outside the home often faced higher rates, reflecting backlash effects in contexts where female autonomy is perceived as a threat. The data is a decade old, collected under difficult conditions, and likely underestimates true prevalence.
When Law Aligns With Social Norms
Legal frameworks influence behaviour by altering incentives. Criminalisation raises the expected cost of violence, creates pathways for reporting, and can shift social expectations. When these conditions are absent or reversed, law does not restrain behaviour; it can sustain or actively reinforce what is already norm-consistent.
The 2015 data captured a society in which violence was already norm-consistent. The 2025 penal code removes any gap between social practice and legal rule.
The shift is institutional. The effect of law depends on three conditions: state capacity to enforce rules, political incentives to prioritise protection, and external pressure that raises the cost of inaction. When these are weak or aligned in the opposite direction, legal frameworks cease to function as constraints.
Afghanistan had earlier enacted the 2009 Elimination of Violence Against Women law, which criminalised forced marriage, rape, and domestic abuse. Implementation was uneven, but the law established a formal standard and limited space for recourse. The current code reflects a system in which enforcement aligns with prevailing norms.
The Removal of Institutional Safeguards
The shift in legal alignment has been accompanied by the removal of conditions that could have reduced violence over time. These include access to education, legal recourse, and the ability to speak openly. Girls above primary school age are barred from secondary education, and criticism of the penal code is criminalised.
At the household level, these changes lower the risks associated with violence and narrow the possibility of response. Reporting becomes infeasible when complaint processes are mediated by those with authority over the victim. The result is not just persistence of violence, but its stabilisation within everyday life, creating conditions in which it remains low-risk and socially reinforced.
Global Engagement and Its Constraints
International responses have followed a familiar pattern: initial condemnation followed by recalibration and continued engagement. Humanitarian aid requires interaction with governing authorities, conferring operational legitimacy, while women’s rights are often treated as a parallel rather than core condition of engagement.
These responses reflect structural constraints. Humanitarian needs require engagement, political fatigue limits coercive options, and regional actors prioritise stability. The result is continued engagement without meaningful change in underlying conditions.
For countries engaging under similar constraints, including India and other Global South actors, this raises a strategic question. Engagement under humanitarian or regional imperatives often proceeds without strong conditionality, limiting space for rights-based reforms. The Afghan case highlights the need to design engagement frameworks that incorporate baseline governance standards without disrupting essential channels of cooperation.
Reframing Policy Response
Policy responses operate within these constraints, yet their design still matters. Aid conditionality can treat women’s rights as threshold conditions rather than secondary concerns. Diplomatic engagement can be structured in tiers, linking deeper recognition to measurable benchmarks. Monitoring mechanisms can generate records that shape future accountability, even when enforcement capacity is limited. Consistency across these channels reduces the risk that external engagement reinforces regressive outcomes.
Locating the Case in Comparative Perspective
Afghanistan’s trajectory can be located within a broader spectrum of how law interacts with social norms. Some systems combine progressive laws with weak enforcement, as in Afghanistan under the EVAW framework. Others move gradually to recognise domestic violence in law, as seen in Saudi Arabia before 2013. A third category includes systems where legal frameworks embed hierarchical authority structures, as in Iran. Afghanistan’s current code represents a more extreme case in which law directly encodes social violence, removing the distinction between norm and legal rule.
Afghanistan’s penal code illustrates a broader institutional principle. When law aligns with entrenched social norms, it stabilises them by shaping behaviour across society. External engagement interacts with this system by affecting legitimacy and cost structures. The policy challenge lies in structuring engagement so that it preserves space for institutional change.