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The Global Persecution of Women
Glossary
Joan Holmes, President of the Hunger Project, “Keynote Address” at the Conference on The Girl Child: The Future Depends on Her, 6 Nov. 2004.
Introduction
The treatment of women and girls is the greatest violation of human rights in our world today.
Ninety-three million women and girls are “missing” from the world population because of sex-selective abortion, female infanticide, malnutrition, abuse and neglect of girl children. This is roughly equivalent to all the deaths in all the wars of the 20th century – the most violent century in human history. This is a holocaust many times over.
So why don’t we as citizens of the world hear of this tragedy?
What kind of world are we living in where 93 million lives can be extinguished just because they’re girls? Where’s our shame? Where’s our moral outrage?
Gender discrimination is the greatest moral challenge of our age. And, we will be judged by history on how we respond to this challenge.
Basic issues
The developing world faces problems that affect the entire global community: hunger, poverty, HIV/AIDS and population growth. The developing world also has the most severe discrimination of women and girls.
These facts are not unrelated. This severe discrimination of women and girls is a primary cause of the persistence of these problems.
Let’s look at the facts.
India has the 12th largest economy in the world. Sixty million tons of grain in storage. And it has one of the highest rates of childhood malnutrition. When this inexplicable phenomenon was studied by UNICEF, it was found that “the exceptionally high rates of malnutrition in India are rooted deep in the soil of inequality between men and women.”
Africa has the highest rates of HIV/AIDS transmission in the world. This is a pandemic and there are two reasons for it: men have unsafe sex with multiple partners, and women lack the power to negotiate if or how sex takes place.
And, while it is well known that women and girls are the most affected by society’s problems, what is less well known is that the empowerment of girls and women has the greatest overall positive effect on the entire society.
Recent analysis by the World Bank and other institutions indicates that when women and girls are empowered, the overall health and well-being of a society is greatly improved:
Today’s girls are tomorrow’s women. Girls cannot advance without the advancement of women. And no improvement in women’s lives will be sustained unless girls have education, good health and the opportunity to achieve their potential.
The Life of a Girl Child
As a human family, we are doing a really terrible job of taking care of our girl children.
While there are many countries where little girls are cherished, loved, and cared for, the vast majority of girls live in countries where this is Mnot so. It is the condition of girls in these countries that is so critical to our future.
This is not to deny or diminish the desperate lives led by many of the world’s boys. Boys are conscripted as soldiers, trafficked in the sex trade and 40 million boys worldwide are without access to basic education. As appalling and unacceptable as these facts are, they in no way compare to the tragic conditions and mistreatment of our girls.
A little girl eats last and least and she is up to three times more likely than boys to suffer malnutrition.
She is often not taken to the doctor when she is sick and she is less likely to be immunized.
Girls are often kept out of school and put to work. Whether at home, in factories or in the field, little girls are at work. She starts work at a very young age, and works from dawn to dusk, proving the adage “A girl is never a child.”
If she does go to school, she’s still at risk. Rather than being a safe refuge and a source of empowerment, the school situation is often dangerous. A recent study showed that 32% of reported child rapes in South Africa were committed by school teachers.
This is the life of a girl in the developing world, if she is allowed to live at all. Each and every year, millions of sex-selective abortions are performed, virtually always on female fetuses.
If you go to one of the poorest states in India and take a car from the capital to the most remote village, you will not find health clinics, sanitation or clean water. What you will find is the latest technology to determine the sex of a fetus.
It is estimated that annually 1 million female fetuses are aborted in China and 5 million in India, even though laws have been passed to stop this despicable practice.
In addition to feticide, there is female infanticide – babies killed at birth – again, just because they are girls.
Infanticide occurs in 17 countries. In India alone, more than 10,000 girl babies are victims of infanticide each year. Many people feel that the actual number is much higher. This is nothing short of murder.
In China and India, there are growing disparities between the number of men and the number of women. In some areas, the disparity is as great as 710 women for every 1000 men.
If it doesn’t kill her by infancy, violence is an ever present danger throughout her girlhood and throughout the rest of her life.
If she is a girl in Africa, the Middle East or other parts of the world, she may be subjected to Female Genital Mutilation. Two million girls, usually between the ages of four and eight, fall victim to this practice each and every year.
Early in a girl’s life, she is often forced into sexual relations. 50% of all sexual assaults are committed against girls age 15 or younger.
She is married without her consent and becomes pregnant long before her body is ready. The leading cause of death for girls age 15-19 is complications from pregnancy.
Annually, two million girls between the ages of five and 15 are forced into the commercial sex market.
By the time she is 15, a girl is most likely malnourished, unhealthy, and has little or no education. She has worked the majority of her life. And she’s been mistreated, exploited and abused, probably by someone she knows.
And, with each new generation of girls who continue to be mistreated, those basic issues that face our human family continue to be perpetuated.
The time is now
It doesn’t need to be this way. And it can not continue to stay this way if we want a healthy, productive, just and peaceful world.
Kofi Annan has said: "There is no tool for development more effective than the education of girls. No other policy is as likely to raise economic productivity, lower infant and maternal mortality, improve nutrition and promote health – including helping to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.”
USAID has stated, “We know that girls' education is perhaps the single most important investment a developing country can make."
And from the World Food Program we hear "If we want to change the world – and we all do – there is one way to do that: educate girls."
The constraints and the shackles that have been put on girls’ lives for centuries are beginning — just beginning—to be removed.
We’re at a moment in history when finally a girl’s value to society can be recognized and supported, enabled and empowered.
Links
The Global Persecution of Women
Glossary
