Scandal of child brides will only end if we act on women’s rights

TWENTY-FIVE years ago this month 50,000 delegates landed in Beijing f or the Fourth World Conference on Women, the largest ever global gathering to discuss and advance women’s equality and human rights.

The opening ceremony was a flamboyant fireworks and acrobatic display, with hundreds of Chinese dancers and artists in a wide array of colourful traditional and modern dress.

I was among the delegates at the conference aimed at securing a strong commitment from world leaders on policies to promote and advance women’s rights.

Over three weeks the ‘Beijing Platform for Action’ was agreed, to promote women’s equality, and to which nation states would sign up. The final text of the platform contained significant commitments to address women’ s inequality and it was heralded as a success in achieving consensus across such potentially divisive issues as reproductive rights, land ownership and women in conflict resolution.

The platform also included recognition of violence against women as a human rights issue, not a ‘domestic’ issue to be dealt with at the family level.

But was it perfect? Did it solve all our problems? How far have we come since?

In a recent report, UN Women said progress since Beijing has been far too slow and uneven.

And they warned that gender equality is lagging behind, while hard-fought gains are now under threat. It also said that, globally, progress on women’s access to paid work has ground to a halt over the past 20 years, that women continue to shoulder the bulk of unpaid care and domestic work, and that nearly one in five women (18%) have faced violence from an intimate partner in the past year.

GOAL witnesses daily, in the countries in which we are working, the unfinished business of Beijing. While we’ve seen significant progress on poverty eradication in the past quarter of a century, today 12 million girls get married every year, some 650 million women alive today were child brides and women in rural parts of Africa still spend 40 billion hours a year collecting water.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of the Beijing conference was using multilateral diplomacy to promote and advance women’s human rights.

But we are now in a world where multilateral leadership has been seriously undermined.

Now 25 years on, a renewed global commitment is needed, where individuals, states, agencies and NGOs, such as GOAL, collaborate to reinforce efforts to achieve the promise of Beijing.

MARY VAN LIESHOUT, Deputy CEO GOAL, Dún Laoghaire.

Be fair to ALL students

MINISTER for Education Norma Foley must tell us now how many students were squeezed out of their chosen courses as a result of approximately 6,000 students having had their Leaving Cert grades overestimated. The minister has confirmed, over the weekend, that the number of students who had their grades overestimated was roughly equal to the 6,100 students who had their grades underestimated.

The minister conceded, in a Dáil exchange with myself last Thursday night, that it was ‘absolutely very possible’ that students lost out on their chosen courses as a result of this.

I support the position that no student whose grades were overestimated should now have their grade marked down.

However, it is not acceptable that students be squeezed out of their chosen courses as a result of a mistake made by the Department of Education.

The only way this situation can be rectified is by the minister telling us how many students lost out as a result, and increasing the number of course places by at least a corresponding amount.