Many girls around world still getting ‘raw deal’
As Day of the Girl Child approaches, progress on women’s equality remains slow
“My parents do not give value or recognition to me,” says a15-year-old girl in Nepal.
“They only have praise for my brother.”
In western countries, that might be a peevish complaint from a resentful sibling.
But in much of the developing world — where some 600 million girls are growing up — it’s a bitter daily fact of life.
The disadvantagement of girls is the focus of UN’s fourth annual Day of the Girl Child, held on Sunday. It’s a time for launching plans to reshuffle the deck that is stacked against girls in poor countries, and for taking stock of the efforts needed to create a world free of discrimination against young women and girls.
In Plan Canada’s newly released study, the Unfinished Business of Girls’ Rights, interviews with more than 4,000 girls in Ecuador, Nicaragua, Pakistan and Zimbabwe found that girls across the world are feeling the pain of inequality.
They believe they have little control over the most crucial decisions that shape their lives, including the lack of access and knowledge that lead to early pregnancy and make them powerless to fight back against early marriage.
They also feel less safe than their brothers in school and public places, and just using the toilet at school is a perilous venture.
After more than a decade of progress, Plan says, “girls are getting a raw deal.” Underpinning it is the raw fact that girls, compared with boys, are still dangerously undervalued.
One area where girls have the least power is early marriage, a practice that turns them into chattels traded off to cancel family debts, solidify clan relationships, reduce the burden on poor families or ensure that a daughter will marry before rape or romance can “dishonour” her family.
Some underage weddings are co- vert “midnight marriages” that send Indian girls as young as five to the altar with boys or men they have never met.
In others, militants force “temporary” marriages on captives, who are passed from one man to another, often dying from injuries or suicide.
“Kidnap marriages” continue in the Caucasus region, where families make deals with their daughters’ abductors and abandon the girls to their fate.
And in Syrian refugee camps destitute parents sell young girls to wealthy Gulf men for money to help their families survive.
A new study by Care International, Vows of Poverty, links early marriage in poor countries with lack of education that disadvantages women and blights their lives.
It says that girls in “an alarming 26 countries are more likely to be forced into marriage before age 18 than to enrol in secondary school.”
That should be a wake-up call for all those who believe in unlocking the potential of adolescent girls, says Care Canada’s vice-president of international programs, Jackie Wright.
“Every time a girl under 18 is forced into a marriage or prevented from attending school, it’s a missed opportunity to improve that girl’s life and strike at the roots of poverty.”
Of the top five countries with the biggest gaps between percentage of child marriages and percentage of female enrolment, all are in Africa.
Although poverty, conflicts, dowry practices and lack of laws banning child marriage — as well as lax enforcement of laws — are drivers of early marriage, it’s the devaluation of the lives of girls and women that perpetuates the practice.
Secondary education is the benchmark of success for improving girls’ learning, says Care.
Although girls are catching up with boys in primary school enrolment, many more drop out in adolescence, when they are threatened by gender- related risks, from sexual coercion to domestic servitude, violence, early marriage and pregnancy.
Once caught in the trap of early marriage, few young women can escape lifelong poverty.
“I wanted to study to 12th grade,” Jobeda, a 21-year-old Bangladeshi woman, told Care. “It’s a dream long gone.”
Progress on women’s equality is slow. A report released this week by the UN’s cultural agency UNESCO found that more than half of the world’s countries failed to achieve gender parity in primary and secondary education.
But there’s reason to hope that may change, after the UN’s new Sustainable Development Goals were endorsed last month.
The development of poor countries depends on women’s progress, says the Plan report: but only if there’s higher priority for overcoming gender-based inequality, exclusion and injustice.