The Taliban's recent changes to Afghanistan's criminal laws have made life for Afghan women a legal risk, not just adding pages to the country's law books. Human rights monitors say that the draft's and the now-enacted penal provisions and related "virtue and vice" rules make gendered controls official. These controls institutionalize domestic violence, limit social interaction and mobility, and make it easier for hard-line regime elements to carry out corporal punishments that they have long promised. So, it's important to look at the Taliban's changes as a legal framework that changes social control into state-sponsored punishments and moral governance....