Royal Buscombe; 45 year member of PPSEAWA
Los Angeles Chapter Report
PDF Version of this Bulletin
Listening to the Girls
Reported by Dr. Girardi to the Chicago Chapter
The working Group on Girls of the NGO Committee on UNICEF invited 15 girls, ages 13-19, from eight countries, to attend the 42nd Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in March of 1997. One girl spoke to the CSW Plenary. Ten girls spoke to a noon-time meeting of NGO's, at which two acted as facilitators and two others answered questions from the floor. The girls themselves selected topics and formats and decided who would speak when and where, and who would facilitate or answer questions. Financial sponsors of the various girls included the Armenian Relief Society, Inc., the Baha'i International Community, the NGO Committee on UNICEF, Working Group on Girls, Save the Children, Girls International Forum, and Girl Scouts of the USA.
The girls selected to come to the United Nations were all outstanding in their various spheres of life. They are good students and good speakers, most with poise beyond their years. They are worthy of being listened to and taken seriously.
1. ARMENIA: Gayane Marukian, 14, from Yerevan, one of Armenia's largest cities. She is in 6th grade and her special interests are languages and computer science. Her hobbies are reading, music, and dancing. She said:
There are not enough organizations for girls or women in Armenia. Armenia has only 1 woman cabinet Minister. Girls marry as early as 16. Women say nothing about their rights; they must obey men. If working women speak out they get fired. Boys are free in actions in school, while girls take 2nd position. Teachers pay more attention to boys and it is hard for girls to get good grades.
2. BRAZIL: Milena Dalmachio Silva, 18, from Brasilia. She is a member of the Regional Youth Committee of the Federal District and participates in the Baha'i Arts Group. During 1998 she will be traveling around Brazil as a participant in youth activities, such as workshops, debates, and other interactions aimed at promoting a better world full of justice, spirituality, love, and service. She recently attended the International Baha'i Youth Congress in Chile. In 1999, she plans to attend university to study journalism. She enjoys theatre, music, dance, reading, making friends, and traveling. She said:
In Brazil there is an inequity between women and men. Many poor girls are not in school - they have to stay home to take care of their siblings. There is a high rate of teenage pregnancy, especially among poor girls. They are ignorant, they don't know what causes pregnancy or HIV/AIDS. THEY NEED EDUCATION! Educated women have fewer and healthier babies. Both sexes should have the same education and opportunities.
3. CHILE: Claudia Ahymada, 15, born in Canada, moved to Chile at age 10. She will be in high school for two more years, and is active in the school drama club. She wants to be a lawyer and is interested in the issue of teen-age pregnancy. She said:
Girls have a lack of awareness that they have human rights - hardly any of them know. They accept abuses because that's part of life and it has always been that way. Most teen pregnancies are due to ignorance There is little sex education and that only in biology classes. The girls don't CHOOSE to be pregnant, but they blame themselves because society teaches them to. If a girl becomes pregnant, she is expelled from school or drops out from shame and guilt, and isolates herself. Education is the key to change: a cultural change is needed to give girls self respect.
4. THE GAMBIA: Keameh Dasha-Danjo, 17. She is the headgirl at her school, where she was selected by her peers to attend the CSW meeting at the UN. As a peer health educator, she promotes the education and health of the girl child both in school and in her community. She pays her school fees herself by weaving hair on weekends. She looks after her niece and nephew, whose mother died as a result of a hemorrhage during childbirth. (No medical help of any kind was available, her only attendant was the speaker, who had to stand there and watch her sister bleed to death, and then take care of the babies. She said:
There are three different kinds of female genital mutilation. Parents want it done to remove the girl's sexuality. It is scary, painful, and leads to urinary problems. Some parents do it at a very early age - a few weeks or months - because then the child can't scratch the wound. Seventy to eighty percent of Gambian women are circumcised. Their religion puts men before women and most marriages are done without the girl's consent. Education is very difficult: it is not free, and many drop out. Most struggle to pay their own fees. In her school, 870 students share 1 typewriter. In the last year, five girls were impregnated by male teachers.
(The last statement provoked a comment from a woman from another African country, who said that if a male teacher abuses a girl student in her country, he gets seven years in jail!)
5. NEPAL: Kanti Khadka, 17, from Surkhet, is active in Junior Nepal Red Cross. She has worked on a health research project conducted by Save the Children UK, collecting data in Surkjet. From that work, she feels that Nepalese girls are experiencing discrimination in terms of health, education, and distribution of food within the household. Unlike boys, who go away to study, Kanti, as a girl, has been educated in her hometown, is currently in first year of study for a B. Ed. She said:
Girls in Nepal have 4 major problems: early marriage, some below 10; high natal mortality; parental preference for boys; and a hard life. Most girls are not in school, they stay at home and work 18 hours a day so both parents can work outside the home. Five to 7,000 girls go into prostitution every year, because they are very poor and must eat.
6. SINGAPORE: Adeline Koay, 14, has a wide range of activities. She belongs to her school choir which won the Singapore Youth Festival Competition gold medal. She has participated in International Competitions for Schools in math, science, and English, and she graduated in the top 10% of her primary school. She is a member of the Red Cross Society, and has made several trips to China. She said:
Girls should go to school because mothers are the first teachers. There are some subjects that girls are not allowed to take and some sports they are not allowed to play. The percent of girls in school is smaller than the percent of boys. Some girls avoid school for fear of sexual harassment, which would ostracize the entire family. Many girls have low self-esteem.
7. SINGAPORE: Sonia Ong, 13, is active in the arts, both in school and in her community. She has won school prizes for singing and storytelling at her school and has performed around Malaysia and Singapore for a range of audiences at such locations as the Women's Halfway House and the Cheshire Home. She is a member of her school choir and the dancing society. She enjoys reading, singing, and playing the piano. She said:
Everybody (in Singapore) is equal before the law, and has equal rights to schooling: 99.1% are enrolled in primary 1. In grades 7 and 8, both boys and girls take both domestic science and technical training.
8. UNITED KINGDOM: Natalie Miriam Gray, 18, from Manchester, UK. She has been involved for several years in a Community Resource Centre in Manchester. They are working on children's participation in local politics and peer education. Natalie is working on a UK Department of Health research project, commenting on children's health issues. She is involved in preparing a video on child prostitution in the UK. She said:
Teenage pregnancy is increasing in the UK. Girls become sexually active before the age of consent. It causes serious for both the mother and baby. The girl may lose contact with her friends and the baby may be born underweight and get poor care from its single parent. Girls as young as 11 are getting abortions. Teenage health centres are needed for advice and help. Bullying of girls happens a lot in the UK and makes the girls prisoners in their own homes.
9. USA: Sara Batterton, 18, a freshman at Columbia U, in NYC. She is interested in studying international relations and foreign languages. She went to the UN Women's Conference in Beijing in 1995 with Girls International Forum. There she worked with other youth to modify the language of the Platform for Action so it would include older women, young women, and girls. Returning to the US, Sara was committed to sharing the stories of people she met in China, and works to empower girls and young women, speaking out in various settings about the Platform for Action. She said:
Teenage pregnancy is a great problem, and it's not getting better, even with education. Most ads on the subject address parents: they should address the girls and the boys, themselves. We now hold parents responsible for their daughters' actions. Redefining attitudes is an attainable goal.
10. USA: Janet Nicole Matthews, honor student from Jersey City, NJ. She graduated in 1996 from high school and has been involved in a variety of community services. She works with the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, is a member of a Youth Missionary Society and Junior NAACP, has worked as a mentor, a peer educator, and a volunteer at the Jersey City Medical Center. She has been active in a variety of sports and has been a swimming instructor. She said:
There is an invisible caste system. We need sex education, ignorance is NOT the way. Teen mothers have a ROUGH time, and boys need to know what teen mothers go through. There is violence in the teen years. Assertiveness clinics and self defense classes are necessary.
When the girls had finished speaking, there were questions from the floor. The questions were often answered by all the speakers in turn.
Closing remarks from Janet Nelson, an executive with UNICEF:
"The girls have brought up some very important issues and there is terrific suffering behind what they said. They are succeeding in their lives without getting the support they deserve. The adults around them have not given them the self-esteem they need. We must allow girls to be part of the solution, and not keep looking at them as being the problem. NGO's can change, attitudes towards girls at home, in school, in our communities and churches."
In summary, the girls brought up the following problems over and over.
1. Lack of equality, or equity, between girls and boys, women and men, with girls and women always in an inferior position. This would include the preference of both parents and teachers for boys over girls, giving girls less food at home and less attention at school.
2. Lack of education for girls and women, including the difficulty for girls to stay in school, which leads to ignorance of women's human rights and of even rudimentary sexual knowledge.
3. Ingrained attitudes in certain cultures, which condone female genital mutilation, foster prostitution, and include shame, guilt, isolation, and ostracism for pregnancy resulting in sexual harassment or rape.
4. All of the above combine to foster low self-respect in girls and women.
The girls, Miss Nelson, and many speakers in the Commission on the Status of Women, agreed that what is needed FIRST is a change in attitude on the part of people in general, more in some countries than others, and that NGO's can help bring about that change.
