There is relish in Khatera Malikzada's voice when she talks about the time the Kabul police needed a woman to help them out. The armed policemen had received strict orders to search a house. But they made it no farther than the front gate.
Following the customs of Islam, “the women refused to let them enter unless they had a female police officer'', Malikzada says.
As Afghan women seek a balance between new opportunities and tradition, the Kabul Police Academy is a unique ground to prove themselves.
Women are moving into better posts, says Tonita Murray, gender adviser to the Afghan department that controls the police, the Ministry of Interior.
Before her assassination, Lieutenant Colonel Malalai Kakar, head of Kandahar's department of crimes against women, was Afghanistan's highest-ranking woman officer.
In a country where men are held responsible for the safety of women, the Afghan attitude towards women police officers is paternalistic, Murray says.
When fellow officer Marzia Faizi went to Herat on a recruiting trip, her now deceased father was so upset with her perceived immodesty that he didn't speak to her for a month.
Faizi's expression radiates fulfilment as she recalls the three months she spent assigned to the Ministry of Counternarcotics as an interrogator.
“Once out of the academy, there may be people wanting to welcome us with a bullet. But there is no other way,'' Faizi says.
Such determination is not universal among women officers, Murray says. “They lack the self-awareness that they can be independent,'' she says.
