Lauryn Oates
Central & South Asia Bureau Assistant Editor and Lieutenant Colonel, Human Rights Brigade
As a scrappy 14-year-old in a west coast bedroom community, Lauryn read a newspaper article in 1996 describing the Taliban’s edicts against women and girls in Afghanistan. She summoned all of her teenage vigor, angst and distemper into a frenzy of rage in response, launching a petition demanding that the rights of women be restored in the barbarous hell of Taliban Afghanistan. The rage frenzy has since been fed a steady diet of confrontations with cultural relativists, stoppists, post-modernists and other unsavoury characters. Today Lauryn works to advance education in conflict zones and to defend the universalism of human rights. She is currently Projects Director for Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, and a doctoral candidate in literacy education at the University of British Columbia. She divides her time between Kabul and Canada's west coast.
