When officials from the Taliban’s Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice stopped Kulsum on a street in western Afghanistan, she was not working for a television station or carrying a professional camera. She was an Instagram content creator trying to collect a payment from a local shop for an advertisement she had posted online.
Four men on two motorcycles followed her, she told Zan Times in a phone interview in late 2025. They humiliated her in front of passersby and forced her into the back of a vehicle at gunpoint. “They did not even let me sit on the seat,” she said. “They pushed me into the trunk of the vehicle.” For three days, her family did not know where she was.
The 23-year-old was a medical student when the Taliban banned women from university education in December 2022. After that, she turned to social media as one of the few remaining ways to earn an income. She posted videos from her daily life and promoted local shops and businesses. At her peak, she said, she earned 10,000 afghani a month, enough to help support her family, including her father, who is a daily wage labourer.
“I needed to work,” she told Zan Times after she was released. “I wanted to help my family.”
Zan Times interviewed 23 women journalists and women media workers across seven provinces of Afghanistan ahead of World Press Freedom Day. Their testimony shows a profession collapsing under multiple pressures. Taliban officials restrict women’s movement, voices, images, and public presence. Media owners use women’s passion for journalism to extract unpaid or underpaid labour. Some journalist-support structures reproduce the same abuses of power they are meant to challenge. Meanwhile, families, fearful of shame and retaliation, often become another layer of restriction.
At least 15 of the women interviewed by Zan Times say they had left, were forced to leave or laid off from journalism, social media work, or a specific media job because of harassment, not being paid for their work, Taliban threats, nepotism, family pressure, or unsafe working conditions. At least five said men in positions of power — including media managers, Taliban members, or figures connected to journalist-support structures — had pressured them for marriage, sex, or relationships.
Most of the women asked Zan Times not to name their outlets, provinces, or include identifying details for fear that they could be exposed to retaliation. Zan Times is therefore withholding the names of their outlets and provinces to protect the safety of the women interviewed. However, we corroborated the pattern of abuse described by the women through interviews with different sources.
Kulsum said she had received warnings not to appear online or make herself visible to the public from officials of the Taliban’s vice and virtue ministry before her detention. “They said I should not be active on social media,” she said. “Even though I observed the hijab [rules] they demanded, they told me I had no right to work.”
After those warnings, Kulsum left Afghanistan with her family. For a year, they stayed in Iran, but had to return to Afghanistan when they couldn’t find work. She resumed her online activity, trying to earn money through advertisements. Soon, Taliban officials came to her family’s home while she was away.
In the fall of 2025, she said she was detained by the Taliban and her phone was confiscated. No female officer was present during the arrest, she said, as she was taken to a police station and then to the vice and virtue directorate.
For three days and nights, her family didn’t know what happened to her. “My family searched the homes of relatives,” she said. “Then they went to hospitals and morgues, trying to find any trace of me.”
When she was finally released, Taliban officials summoned her father, brother and uncle, she explained. She and her male relatives were forced to sign written pledges that she will not engage in her online work, which the Taliban described as a “moral crime.” Her Instagram account was deleted.
For Kulsum, the punishment did not end with her release. Soon, relatives and people around her began questioning what had happened to her during the three days she was missing.
“They would say, ‘God knows what happened to you in those three nights,’” she said. In Afghanistan, detention does not end at the prison door. It follows women home. A woman who is arrested or detained overnight is forced to answer not only for what happened but for what others imagine may have happened to her.
In Kulsum’s case, her relatives were speculating that she was sexually abused in the prison. In Afghanistan, it is always the woman who is to blame and stigmatized. Two days after her release, under the weight of the accusations and humiliation, Kulsum attempted suicide, she said, and was hospitalized.
Women who continue to work in the media sector face a different but related pressure. They are often needed by outlets that want women’s programming, but they are often denied pay, documentation, protection, or dignity.
Maria, 25, graduated from journalism in 2022. She loved radio and went to a local station in a northeastern province to ask if it had a job opening for her. The owner, a man in his 40s, told her she could present women’s programs but that the station had no budget to pay her salary or transport costs.
Eager to start her career, she signed a contract requiring her to be at the station six days a week, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., and to do whatever work she was assigned. “Every morning, alongside the joy of sitting behind the microphone, I felt a tremor in my body,” she said. “It was the fear of asking my mother for taxi fare.” She paid 50 afghani a day for transport. Her mother gave her the money from the household budget or asked Maria’s father for it. At the time, her father was the only employed member of her family.
In 2023, Maria was sent by the radio station to a three-day psychosocial training organized by a journalist-support organization funded by international donors. Participants were supposed to receive money for transportation. At the end of the seminar, she said, she received 1,500 afghani. As she put the envelope in her bag, the radio manager called and told her to bring it to his office. “They took 1,000,” she said. “Three hundred went to transport. Only 200 afghani remained for me.”
After two years of working under such conditions, the station received a donor-funded project worth US$35,000 for one year, according to Maria. Staff were asked to provide their education documents for the proposal. The women working at the radio station hoped it meant they would finally be paid.
Instead, they were told they would receive lunch, not salaries, she told Zan Times. “We looked at this project like a light,” Maria said. “But the bitterest part was that the respected international organization did not even ask whether we were receiving salaries or not.”
Maria resigned in 2024. She said the station refused to give her a certificate of experience or a letter of reference, telling her she was not entitled to one because she had not completed eight years of unpaid internship.
“When I packed my things and looked at the microphone for the last time, I felt all my dreams had died,” she said. “As I walked down the stairs, I cried silently for my voice, which had been suffocated. They did not only steal my money. They took my will to live and my motivation for journalism.”
Unpaid work appeared repeatedly in the interviews. Rahan said she left journalism after a long period without salary. Haya also said she left after non-payment and when she was forced to split seminar money with the owner of a media outlet. Negar explained how she left her previous job because the outlet did not pay her; she now works from home while also teaching at a kindergarten because journalism pays so little. In Kabul, Nahid said she left local media because of a lack of salary. She now works with exiled media outlets but continues to face serious financial hardship.
While Aria is still working, she says she only receives 4,000 afghani a month for four programs, far less than male colleagues are paid for similar workloads.
For women who remain in the media industry, the low pay is compounded by restrictions on what they can say. Aria said she works on a cultural and poetry program, but even there, Taliban rules shape the content. She said she cannot recite poems in a melodic voice, use certain words, or raise issues related to girls’ education, feminism, or subjects that could “enlighten public minds.” Her content must be approved by her radio manager who has a friendly relationship with the Taliban, she stated.
Sexual harassment and coercion are also driving women out of journalism. At least five of the women interviewed by Zan Times said men in positions of power had pressured them for marriage, sex, or relationships.
Sakina used to work as a radio presenter in an eastern province. The 26-year-old said her radio manager, a married man with two children, initially treated her kindly and praised her work. Then he messaged her on WhatsApp saying he loved her and wanted to marry her. She tried to tell him she was engaged so he would leave her alone. Instead, she said, he threatened her. “He would say, ‘I will kidnap you,’” she said. “I do not know if he was joking or he really meant it.”
During coverage of a natural disaster in eastern Afghanistan, Sakina said the manager tried to sit beside her in a tent and hold her hand. She refused. “That day I could not work,” she said. “My mental state was completely disturbed. I could not tell my family because I knew they would blame me and stop me from working.” The next day, colleagues told her she had been dismissed. When she asked why, they said she had insulted the manager.
Rona, a radio presenter in an eastern province, said she was followed by a Taliban member on her way to work in 2023. The man stopped her rickshaw and told her not to leave home again. When she asked who he was, he threatened to report her to vice and virtue as well as the intelligence directorate.
She says that the same man followed her to the radio station and beat her rickshaw driver after he refused to give them her phone number. She later learned from the radio manager that the man wanted to force her into marriage. Her family stopped her from working for a year.
In another incident, Rona said, vice and virtue officials entered the studio while she was in the middle of a live program. After it ended, they berated her. “They told me: ‘Have you no shame?’” she said. “I told them, ‘I am a woman, the technical staff is a woman, and I work for women. Where is the shame?’” After arguing with them, she was banned from being on air for three months.
Still, she continued to work in radio because she does not want women’s voices to disappear. She earns about 2,000 afghani a month, including transport and small payments for recording announcements. “In every radio station where I have worked, they first told me to make good programs and said projects would come and I would receive a good salary,” she said. “But in five years, without exception, I have never received a regular salary.”
Even structures created to support journalists have failed some women. Farank, 23, worked for six months with a women journalists’ coordination group in northern Afghanistan. The group was supposed to advocate for women journalists and help address problems such as unpaid work and lack of press cards. In some cases, she said, the group successfully persuaded local media outlets to issue identification cards and consider paying women staff. But she eventually resigned, citing nepotism, favouritism and salary-splitting. In some cases, she said, women with formal contracts were expected to split their $100 monthly salaries with others who had been informally added to the group.
One woman said she was asked for sex in exchange for work or assistance. Another, a divorced journalist with a daughter, said a man connected to a journalist-support body used her divorce to sexually harass her, implying that because she was divorced she should be available for sex.
Women felt they had nowhere to go with problems. Several women said they could not complain to the Taliban because being a woman journalist could itself expose them to punishment. Others said they could not tell their families about harassment because they would be blamed or stopped from working. Some said they could not speak publicly because a media owner, official or harasser could accuse them of immorality and endanger them further.
Their stories show that Afghan women journalists have not disappeared because they lack courage, skill, or commitment. They are being pushed out by a system that punishes their visibility, exploits their labour, and leaves them alone to carry the consequences.
Today, Kulsum still works online under a pseudonym, without showing her face or using her voice. “I am still forced to work,” she said. “But there can be no trace of me in what I publish.”
Hajar Sadat*, Laila Mandegar, Faranak, Maria Rahim, Hosai and Rahan contributed reporting. *Names have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewees and writer.
