Click to expand Image Afghan women walk past razor barricades along a roadside in Kabul on December 8, 2024. © 2025 Ahmad Sahelarman/AFP via Getty Images Since July 16, the Taliban have arrested dozens of women and girls in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, for allegedly violating Taliban dress codes. The slew of arrests mark yet another continuation of the Taliban’s relentless attack on women’s autonomy, causing fear and intimidation for women and girls across Afghanistan.The arrests deepen the Taliban’s enforcement of their outrageous August 2024 “vice and virtue” decree requiring women to completely cover their bodies, including their faces, in public at all times. “There is no such a thing as bad hijab in Afghanistan at the moment,” Sara (not her real name) told me. “But no matter what levels of restrictions the Taliban create, women and girls will still go outdoors and add fashion and color to their hijabs. This seems to be the Taliban’s real problem.”Sara’s assessment is both sad and hopeful. It describes the overwhelming oppression women and girls face under Taliban rule. But it also highlights the subtle ways women and girls resist in day-to-day life, bargaining with patriarchy, and claiming some agency and ownership.By asserting dominance and seeking to reinforce patriarchal power through controlling women’s bodies and identities, the Taliban act as a gendered moral authority in Afghanistan, seeking to push women and girls ever further out of public life. This is part of a larger system Afghan women’s rights defenders and United Nations experts call “gender apartheid.” Women are forced indoors by being excluded from employment, education, and freedom of movement. Every time women find ways to bargain with these misogynistic rules, the Taliban crack down harder.By arresting women and girls for alleged “bad hijab,” the Taliban impose physical and psychological violence, aiming for systematic erasure of women’s autonomy and total female obedience.“No matter what tactics or power authorities use, we will still find ways to go out. We can’t be imprisoned at home,” Sara’s sister Nahid said.As Taliban abuses escalate, the international community has too often responded with silence, or even harmful steps to normalize these abuses, such as Russia’s recent decision to become the sole country recognizing the Taliban.Every country that cares about women, girls, and their rights should do more to stand with Afghan women, including supporting their call for the creation of an international crime of gender apartheid.