Dear readers, thank you very much for the enthusiastic response we received for our blog competition announced in June. It was very exciting to know what you think about education and the kind of experiences you have had at school.

Tamana Jamily writes about her experiences at school and the difficulties women and girls in Afghanistan face. The problems they face in their homes and families have not helped improve their situation.

"Slutwalk" programmes are an attempt to sensitize men towards their female contemporaries

Sherlyn Chopra is the first Indian woman to feature in Playboy. The Indian media is choc-a-bloc with news about the model, her life and challenges, the hardships she faced and the accolades she won after she was chosen to “decorate” the pages of Playboy. The media in India obviously knows that this will generate a lot of interest, and it has. Until now, Indian newspapers and magazines have been trying to create the impression that they are simply presenting the “facts” as they are. Strangely enough, in a country which has seen a couple of shocking incidents of crime against women in the past few weeks, nobody has commented on the social impact of Sherlyn’s “contribution” to Playboy or that of other scantily clad stars.

Jahantab Faiz reminisces about her time at school, when she and friends played ball and how the rise of the Taliban shattered her school and her dreams.

Arson and poison attacks on schools across Afghanistan, mostly against those teaching girls, have forced students to defend themselves, an extra-curricular activity imposed by the government which blames the Taliban for the violence.  Some 550 schools in 11 provinces have been closed because the state could not provide enough security.

If you live in a tribal area in Pakistan, you are a woman, you are not educated or financially independent and the men in your family are the sovereign decision makers, then your chances of being victimized by an eccentric decision taken by a group of elderly men from your tribe, who you might not even know, are huge.

Afghanistan has been suffering from internal conflict and violence for the last three decades. This, combined with extreme poverty in many cases, has caused people to lose their mental stability. Several cases of violence illustrate how women routinely become victims of violence in patriarchal Afghan society.