By Aneeta Prem
A school gate does not look like violence. It looks like paint, metal, a lock. It looks like something that can be explained away.
But for a girl who turns up to learn and is turned away because she is female, the gate becomes a judgement. When that judgement is repeated for day after day, year after year, it stops being an incident. It becomes a life.
That is what 1,500 days without school for Afghan girls means. Not a slogan. Time that cannot be returned.
My father, Chandra Shekhar Prem, set up a college for girls in Himachal Pradesh to prevent early marriage. He did not do it for applause. He did it because education is protection. With his last breath, he turned that belief into reality. As a family, we made sacrifices because we understood what happens when girls are denied learning.
Control moves in.
UNESCO has described Afghanistan as the only country in the world where secondary and higher education is strictly forbidden to girls and women. UNESCO also warns that nearly 2.2 million girls are barred from education beyond primary level. UNICEF has stated that 2.2 million girls are affected, including almost 400,000 more girls deprived as the 2025 school year began.
Those figures matter because of what they do to safeguarding. School is visibility. It is routine. It is other adults who might notice fear, withdrawal, sudden absence. When school is removed, witnesses disappear too.
UNICEF included one detail that captures the quiet harm: a 15-year-old girl at home, drawing, out of school for three and a half years after being in eighth grade when the ban began. One child, one image, and yet it holds the truth. A child still trying to grow while the world around her shrinks. “After 1,500 days, a locked school gate stops being a gate. It becomes the world a girl is expected to accept.”
This is not only an education story. It is a safeguarding emergency.
A girl without education has fewer exits. A girl without education is easier to isolate. A girl told she has no future is easier to pressure. That is when harmful “family decisions” can hide in plain sight, dressed up as tradition.
I have been contacted by people desperate to get their girls into education, and desperate too for their boys to learn respect for women and girls. They are not asking for slogans. They are asking for safety. They can see what happens when boys are taught entitlement and girls are taught silence.
A woman contacted me from Afghanistan. She is living under Taliban rule. She told me her husband agreed to their daughter, only 14, being married in a religious ceremony to a man of 34 because “family honour” was said to be at stake.
Read that again.
That is not honour. That is a child being handed over.
Child marriage is not “honour-based violence”. We must not use that language. It is child abuse, and we should name it without apology. “Child marriage is not honour-based violence. We must not use that language.”
UNFPA defines child marriage as any formal marriage or informal union where at least one party is under 18. UNFPA also states the safeguarding truth at the centre of this issue: due to their age, child spouses are considered incapable of giving full consent.
That line cuts through ceremony. Consent is not created by a ritual.
Where a child cannot give free and full consent, adults do not acquire sexual permission by calling the child a wife. In safeguarding terms, sexual activity with a child is abuse. That is why child marriage is treated internationally as a violation of children’s rights, not a “community issue” to be handled delicately.
And this is the part we should say plainly in the UK too. We need to stop trying to be so politically correct that we end up protecting adult reputations over children. We should stop worrying about “offending” when the stakes are a child’s body, safety, and future. distant.”
The international community must stop treating this as distant.
The world has become dangerously comfortable with watching Afghan girls disappear.
But no society can erase girls from classrooms without consequences. When the world tolerates this, it teaches abusers everywhere that girls’ rights are negotiable.
UNICEF has warned that if the ban continues to 2030, over four million girls could be deprived of education beyond primary school. Those are not abstract numbers. They are futures being closed down in advance.
My father built a college because he believed education prevents early marriage before it begins.
Afghanistan is proving the same truth in reverse. Remove education, and the conditions that enable abuse grow stronger.
After 1,500 days, a locked school gate stops being a gate.
It becomes the world a girl is expected to accept.
UNESCO (19 Aug 2025): Afghanistan: Four years on, 2.2 million girls still banned from school
https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/afghanistan-four-years-22-million-girls-still-banned-school
UNESCO (15 Aug 2024): Afghanistan: 1.4 million girls still banned from school by de facto authorities
https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/afghanistan-14-million-girls-still-banned-school-de-facto-authorities
UNICEF (21 Mar 2025): As new school year starts in Afghanistan, almost 400,000 more girls deprived of their right to education, bringing total to 2.2 million
https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/new-school-year-starts-afghanistan-almost-400000-more-girls-deprived-their-right
UNFPA: Child marriage (definition and consent statement)
https://eeca.unfpa.org/en/topics/child-marriage
Associated Press: report summarising UNICEF warning, including the 2030 projection
https://apnews.com/article/54930502f36c3b24c042b79fc30c5fa4
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