From Silence to Strength: Uncovering the Hidden Harms Afghan Girls Are Naming for the First Time
Written for Sahar Education by Farzanah Darwish, Program Manager
“They didn’t know the words that wound them, counted as violence.”
Vida, our empowerment teacher in the Underground Teach Sheroes program, told me this. The girls she works with had grown up believing that only physical harm counted as violence. They had no idea that the comments that belittled them, the judgments that silenced them, and the pressure that shaped their every move were all forms of harm. They had lived inside these patterns for so long that none of it felt unusual.
The moment she said this, something shifted in me. No matter how carefully I prepare lessons, nothing compares to the truths that emerge from the teachers who stand beside our students every day. Their voices reveal the raw, lived reality of gender based violence, the kind that hides in tone, in silence, in expectations, in the smallest moments that become so normalized they disappear. Most people imagine violence only in its visible forms, but the violence that shaped my life, and the lives of so many Afghan girls and women, is quieter and more familiar. It lives in the comments that diminish a girl, the judgments that silence her, the pressure that molds her every move, the subtle ways she is told who she is allowed to be. These repeated moments accumulate and build walls around her long before she knows she is allowed to question them.
As I continued the journey of working closely with our empowerment teachers, designing the curriculum for them, training them, and learning from them in return, I wanted to understand not just how the material was delivered, but how it lived in the hands of the women who carried it into classrooms. These teachers sit beside our students every day. They are the ones who see expressions shift, who hear whispered questions, who witness moments of understanding unfold in real time. Listening to their reflections, the challenges they navigate, and the quiet triumphs they celebrate showed me a kind of honesty and beauty that cannot be captured in documents alone. Hearing their stories, seeing the care they bring into their classrooms, and witnessing the tenderness with which they hold their students’ realities made me want to honor their voices and share them.
Shogofa, our empowerment teacher in the Threads of Hope program, works with women who have never been to school, women who have lived entire lives surrounded by normalized forms of violence. When I asked her what she noticed while teaching gender based violence sessions, she shared that many of the women did not realize how deeply violence existed in their daily routines. They described slaps dismissed as discipline, insults delivered as ordinary conversation, and the belief that a girl belongs inside the home as something unquestionable. None of it felt like violence to them. It simply felt like life.
But when awareness entered the room, something changed. Families began to reflect on their behavior. Many said they had never known these actions were forms of violence, and once they understood, they no longer wanted to continue them. Some mothers realized that the pain they had carried since childhood was quietly appearing in their children’s lives. One mother told her, “My daughter’s lack of confidence came from my own behavior, but I never knew it.”
The program transformed Shogofa as well. She explained that at the beginning, the women in her class rarely helped one another. By the end, they were kinder, more cooperative, and more protective. Watching them move from silence to solidarity felt like witnessing a quiet revolution, soft and steady but deeply powerful.
Vida witnessed similar shifts. She teaches girls between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five and still remembers her first lesson clearly. She taught them about basic human needs using Maslow’s Hierarchy. When the girls learned that every human being has essential needs, they cried. They said they had never known these needs belonged to them. They explained that they had not believed a day would come when they could sit in a classroom again, learn, or be told they were worthy as human beings.
Day by day, the atmosphere in her classroom grew gentler. The emotional wound caused by years of being denied education slowly began to heal. One of the most significant discussions was about emotional and physical violence. Many girls did not know that certain words could hurt deeply enough to be considered violence, especially when spoken by men. They did not know that women could harm other women too. These realizations helped them name experiences they had carried silently for years. Naming these experiences gave the girls language for their pain. It helped them understand themselves, their families, and one another in new and healing ways.
Listening to Shogofa and Vida, I felt something shift within me as well. Their stories carried grief and resilience. Pain and possibility. They reminded me that empowerment does not begin with loud, public gestures. It begins quietly, with a single tear, a moment of clarity, a truth finally spoken aloud.
Change in Afghanistan rarely arrives dramatically. It grows quietly, in hidden basements and borrowed rooms, in whispered conversations and shared understanding. It grows in the hearts of women and girls who learn that their feelings matter, that their pain has a name, that their voices deserve to exist.
Every lesson taught, every story shared, every moment of awareness becomes part of something larger, a movement built from connection, courage, tenderness, and dignity. And it is these stories, the lived truths of Shogofa, Vida, and the students they teach, that give me hope. Even in the hardest circumstances, knowledge remains a form of light. And Afghan girls and women, when given even the smallest spark of that light, always find their own way to shine.