“This piece is about what happened to me when I was four or five years old. Somebody touched me and then he just walked away. I was just a female for him. He didn’t care how old I was,” recalled Afghan artist Kubra Khademi. “I was feeling guilty. Why did it happen to me? It was my fault. And I said: ‘I wish my underwear were made of iron’.”

Kubra Khademi presents the suit of armor she had forged for a February 26 protest against sexual harassment (Massoud Hossaini, AP.)

The assault came outside of her Khademi’s childhood home in Quetta, Pakistan, where her family was fleeing from the Taliban. When she screamed, she expected help, but recalled that instead, “all the people stared at me and even started yelling at me: ‘You whore! How dare you scream! Did you enjoy it?’”

It is with this experience in mind that the 27-year-old Khademi took to the streets of Kabul, Afghanistan on February 26 in a suit of armor which a local blacksmith made for 500 Afghanis ($10 USD) covering her breasts and buttocks. The performance was intended to call attention to the commonplace sexual harassment of Afghan women.

In street clothes, hijab, and her armored suit, Kubra Khademi held a demonstration against sexual harassment in Kabul, cut short by attacks (Massoud Hossaini, AP.)

Her armored walk through Kote Sangi, in Kabul’s populous downtown, drew attention indeed. Khademi, wearing her street clothes, the armor, and a hijab, was met with physical and verbal assault, being pelted with stones before escaping in a cab.

Khademi’s performance drew verbal and physical harassment from the crowd of men in Kabul’s downtown, with threats to her safety cutting the demonstration short, as she was forced to flee in a cab from stones being thrown at her (Massoud Hossaini, AP.)

The artist has gone into hiding in the suburbs of Kabul, having received numerous insults and death threats in the wake of her eight-minute performance. Discussing the impact of her protest, Khademi described the reaction as having met her expectations, developed after weeks of interviewing her fellow Afghan women about their experiences with sexual harassment.

Though the demonstration itself was cut short by the attack, discussion of Khademi’s performance has quickly circulated throughout Afghan social media and worldwide news, bringing the plight of Afghan women, an issue usually forced to society’s fringes, to a position of prominence in the country and beyond.