379: What Happens to Women's Rights When There Are No Consequences?

Zahra Nader joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to discuss why, for nearly every five women killed in Afghanistan by their own families, only one man is ever arrested, and how a newsroom of journalists writing under pseudonyms is building the record no one else is keeping.

Chapters

(00:00) - Why Afghanistan Is the Battleground for Women's Rights

(02:07) - Founding a Newsroom in Exile

(08:23) - How Zan Times Protects Its Journalists

(11:59) - Child Marriage and the Laws That Enable It

(19:22) - The Collapse of Maternity Care

(24:53) - Afghanistan as a Global Bellwether

(29:20) - Femicide, Impunity, and the Zan Times Fellowship

(31:35) - What Listeners Can Do

About Zahra Nader

Zahra Nader is the founder and editor-in-chief of Zan Times, a women-led newsroom in exile reporting on human rights violations in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. She began her journalism career in Kabul in 2011, and in 2016 joined the New York Times bureau there, becoming the first Afghan woman to work with mainstream Western media inside the country. She moved to Canada in 2017 for graduate study and was still a doctoral student in gender and women's studies at York University when the Taliban retook Afghanistan in August 2021. She founded Zan Times in August 2022 with $30,000 she had saved to build a home in Kabul, and now runs it from Edmonton alongside a network of journalists who report from inside Afghanistan under pseudonyms. She briefed the UN Security Council in October 2022, and was a 2024–2025 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, where she studied sustainable funding models for exiled newsrooms.