Will you send your daughter to school? Norms, Violence, and Girls’ Education in Uruzgan, Afghanistan

• In Event: School violence and security in comparative perspective

Abstract

Access to education for all children around the world—girls as well as boys—is enshrined by international human rights norms. Despite this broad endorsement, promoting universal rights may conflict with dominant local attitudes, values, or customs. Using purposeful, stratified survey data and qualitative interview data collected in spring 2014, this study explores why parents choose to send their boys and girls to school in Uruzgan, Afghanistan, what prevents them from doing so, and what kinds of normative tensions emerge in this process. Our data show, first, unsurprisingly, that parents whose children do not attend school tend to place significantly less value on educating both girls and boys than parents whose children attend school. Second, the perception of the risk of violence is a powerful variable in explaining parents’ decisions to allow their children to attend school. Parents whose children do not attend school report experiencing or having personal knowledge of a significantly higher number of attacks against education—i.e., violence against parents for sending girls to school and against children for attending—than parents who send their children to school. Third, although the majority of uneducated men in our sample do not choose to enroll girls in school, the majority of uneducated women do. Finally, some local norms strongly support sending girls to school. Regardless of levels of education, both men and women cite tenets of Islam as a key motivator for educating girls and boys. Although some describe education as a human right, they describe Islam as the source of these rights, rather than Western organizations or institutions. Given both the demands for and the reasons for local challenges to education, foreign NGOs supporting these services are unlikely to further aggravate the existing conflict, provided that this support remains evenly distributed to those who call for it.

Authors

• Jehanzaib Khan, New York University

• Dana Burde, New York University