With the limits to women’s freedoms and rights in Afghanistan, being without a male family member creates struggles or in extreme cases could mark the end for some families. As a result, a secretive practice known as Bacha posh, which directly translates to “dressed like a boy” involves families raising their daughters as sons.

This allows girls to dress as men and assume some gender-related freedoms such as working, attending school and escorting female family members.

“Under the Taliban’s vision of a society built on total female subordination, women are banned from most forms of employment and confined to homes and excluded from public life,” says Sahar Fetrat, researcher with the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. Yet these women can’t just lay down and take it, not having a male means ruin, so if they do not have a man, they will be a man.

While the practice allows the women who are willing to incur the risks more movement through society, the consequences of getting caught are dire. NPR cited a four-minute clip  shared in early February on Taliban leadership’s social media as an example. In the video, NPR reports an off-camera voice asks a 13-year-old girl dressed as an Afghan boy “Are you a man or a woman now?” The teen is visibly terrified and it’s unclear when this video was taken or what happened to the child shown in the clip.

Although an ancient practice that has taken on different meaning in modern times, many question the long-term effects on Bacha posh and whether or not it truly offers Afghani women alternatives that are preferable to living as female in the patriarchal society of Afghanistan.