As an Afghan scientist and educator, I never imagined that the age at which many girls experience their first menstrual cycle would one day coincide with the age at which their country would decide their education should end.
For nearly five years, global attention has focused on the Taliban’s ban on girls’ education in Afghanistan. Yet insufficient attention has been paid to a more troubling question: why was sixth grade chosen as the endpoint of girls’ education, and what are the long-term consequences of removing girls from public life precisely when they enter adolescence?
This is no longer simply an education crisis. It is a systematic restructuring of girlhood itself.
The Taliban is creating a dangerous convergence between three factors: exclusion from education after grade six, the transition into puberty, and a legal environment that weakens protections against child marriage. Together, these policies are reshaping the lives of an entire generation of Afghan girls.
The age of exclusion is not arbitrary
Afghanistan is currently the only country in the world where girls are prohibited from attending secondary school and university.
In September 2021, the Taliban indefinitely suspended girls’ access to secondary education. Since then, girls have been prohibited from attending school beyond grade six, usually around the ages of 11 and 12. In December 2022, women were also banned from universities.
According to UNESCO, approximately 2.2 million Afghan girls are currently deprived of secondary education. If these restrictions continue until 2030, UNESCO estimates that more than four million girls could be affected.
The age of twelve deserves particular attention.
Globally, the average age of menarche, or the first menstrual period, is between 12 and 13 years. Regional studies conducted in South and Central Asia show similar patterns, with averages ranging from 12 to 14 years depending on nutrition, socioeconomic status and geography.
Puberty is a normal biological transition. It is not a marker of adulthood.
Yet under Taliban rule, adolescence increasingly marks a girl’s disappearance from public life.
At the precise moment girls require more education, health literacy, social support and opportunities for personal development, they are being removed from the institutions that could protect them.
School is one of the strongest protections against child marriage
Schools do far more than teach mathematics and literacy.
Education is strongly associated with delaying child marriage, improving maternal health, increasing future earnings and reducing intergenerational poverty.
UNICEF has repeatedly shown that girls who remain in school are significantly less likely to marry before the age of 18.
Before the Taliban returned to power, approximately 28 percent of Afghan women aged 20 to 24 had already been married before turning 18. Child marriage existed in Afghanistan long before 2021 and was driven by poverty, conflict, displacement and entrenched patriarchal norms.
However, the Taliban has weakened many of the systems that previously protected girls.
Teachers are no longer available to intervene.
Schools no longer serve as safe spaces.
Economic opportunities have vanished.
Girls’ social networks have narrowed.
As families face worsening economic conditions, early marriage may increasingly be perceived as one of the few available futures for girls.
New legal concerns
In May 2026, the Taliban published Decree No. 18 regarding judicial separation between spouses.
Human rights organizations, including the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), warned that the decree further entrenches discrimination against women and girls. Experts have expressed concern that it fails to establish a clear minimum age for marriage and contains provisions that normalize the treatment of puberty as legally relevant within marital relationships.
The danger lies not in one decree alone but in its interaction with existing restrictions.
When girls are removed from school at age 11 or 12 and legal protections remain weak, adolescence becomes a period of heightened vulnerability.
Menstruation does not equal maturity.
Puberty does not equal consent.
Biological capability does not equal readiness for marriage, pregnancy or motherhood.
This is not Afghan culture
The Taliban frequently frames these restrictions as a defense of Afghan culture.
This argument is historically inaccurate.
Afghanistan has a long tradition of women participating in public life. Afghan women have been teachers, physicians, scientists, poets, entrepreneurs, parliamentarians, journalists and university professors.
For decades, Afghan families invested enormous sacrifices to educate their daughters.
Parents sold possessions to pay school fees.
Girls walked long distances to reach classrooms.
Entire communities celebrated daughters who became doctors and educators.
That is also Afghan culture.
The Taliban is not synonymous with Afghanistan.
Afghan culture is diverse, dynamic and continuously shaped by its people.
What the Taliban is implementing is not cultural preservation but political control.
This is not Islam
The Taliban also invokes religion to justify its restrictions.
However, prominent Islamic institutions across the Muslim world have repeatedly rejected this interpretation.
In December 2022, Grand Imam Ahmed el-Tayeb of Al-Azhar University in Egypt publicly called on the Taliban to reverse its university ban, stating that preventing women from pursuing education contradicts Islamic Sharia and the principles of Islam.
The Muslim World League has similarly promoted universal access to girls’ education and co-organized the 2025 International Conference on Girls’ Education in Muslim Communities alongside the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.
These positions are rooted in a longstanding Islamic tradition that values education for all believers. A widely cited hadith states, “Seeking knowledge is obligatory upon every Muslim,” a principle that contemporary scholars overwhelmingly interpret as applying equally to men and women.
If these restrictions were inherently Islamic, similar policies would exist elsewhere.
They do not.
Girls attend secondary schools and universities in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
Afghanistan under Taliban rule is the exception.
Why Afghanistan is an outlier
Many countries struggle with gender inequality.
Many countries struggle with child marriage.
But no other Muslim-majority country has adopted a national policy that excludes girls from education after primary school.
This distinction matters.
The Taliban’s policies are not an extension of regional traditions or Islamic norms. They are an extremist governance project.
They represent a political effort to engineer female dependency from childhood onward.
This is gender apartheid
Increasingly, legal scholars, Afghan women’s rights defenders and international human rights organizations are calling for the recognition of gender apartheid under international law.
The term describes a system of institutionalized domination and segregation imposed on people based on sex.
Afghanistan increasingly fits this definition.
Women and girls are systematically excluded from education, employment, public spaces, political participation and legal equality.
These are not isolated incidents.
They are coordinated policies.
What makes Afghanistan unique is that the system begins during childhood.
Girls are denied the opportunity to become educated, economically independent and socially visible before they ever have the chance to participate equally in society.
This is not merely discrimination.
It is the state-engineered production of female dependency.
The world must stop describing Afghanistan solely as an education crisis.
It is a transformation of girlhood itself.
A twelve-year-old Afghan girl should be learning science, mathematics, literature and history.
Instead, she is being taught that her future ends where her childhood ends.
The international community must recognize what is happening for what it is: not culture, not religion, but a system of gender apartheid designed to control women from adolescence onward.
Author’s Biography:
Dr. Amna Mehmood is an Afghan/German scientist, educator and science advocate based in Germany. She is a senior scientist at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in Germany and works at the intersection of science, education, intercultural competence and women’s rights. Her writing focuses on Afghan women and girls, education, science and social inclusion.
