A woman’s agency is her right to make her own choices and live the way that she decides. According to Malalai Joya’s narrative of her life in Afghanistan, women during the time period of 2000-2009 did not have much freedom to practice their own agency, even though they would undoubtedly try. Some women would continue to study and receive an education, even though they were being targeted and could get killed. Some women practiced agency by going to Joya and other political and media sources to voice the injustices inflicted upon them. However, some women took a very direct and final approach to reclaiming their own agency: suicide. Women are not given many opportunities to claim and practice their own agency, so suicide was a common way of …show more content…
According to the U.N Development Fund for Women, 80 percent of women are affected by violence at some point in their lives, with a majority of this violence being domestic seeing how between sixty and eighty percent of marriages remained forced and often include young women (Joya, p. 189). The U.N Population fund has delved even deeper by announcing that one in four Afghan women, face sexual violence in their lifetime (Joya, p.189). Healthcare and poverty take tremendous tolls on people’s lives as well, with seventy percent of Afghans facing extreme poverty and acute food insecurity, the unemployment rate likely being ninety percent, and an afghan woman dying from childbirth every twenty-eight minutes (Joya, p. 192-193), it is not surprising that the future seems bleak. These limitations that are both directly and indirectly caused by the government and foreign influences make it so a woman in Afghanistan cannot live her life freely. According to Joya, the U.S invasion and occupation led to the reliance of privatization and the unchecked market economy, which affected poor people the most, even raising the price on formerly cheap Afghan staple foods (Joya, p.192). The media portrayals of Afghan women in the U.S have many Americans believing that the burqa, for example, is the most important problem Afghan women face. But without a security or justice system that protects women from rape, and without employment, food, and basic services, the burqa is secondary (Joya, p.172). With gang rape being used by the warlords as a war strategy, education being illegalized, the oppressive culture placing shame and blame on female victims of sexual abuse, and much more, many limitations were set to keep women from owning their agency. There was only but so much women who were not in places of political power could