Publications
Partners
October 11 was International Day of the Girl Child. That such a day is still necessary is an indictment on our global society. Think of it this way: In 2018, despite the human race being smart enough to have found a way to X-ray the bones inside your body, to do calculations to ensure that a man sent into space lands back on earth safely, and to read our DNA profiles from a bit of spit, half of the global population is treated differently because they have a vagina.
Let me be clear: Differently means unfairly and, more often than not, in an abusive way.
On the day, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the UN’s under secretary-general and the executive director of UN Women, released a statement along with a report. That long report includes this subhead: Emerging Issues in the Elimination of Violence Against Women and Girls – making it frustratingly clear that despite all the attention gender-based violence is getting, converting that attention to action is like having to climb a mountain.
The report goes on to claim: “A study of 42 000 people in the EU found that every second woman (55%) had experienced sexual harassment at least once since the age of 15, and one in five women (21%) had experienced it in the 12 months preceding the survey.”
Read the full report here: Intensification of efforts to eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls
Imagine the statistics where there isn’t even gender equality legislation.
Highlighting what its compilers term “the continuum of violence against women and girls”, the report finds that “one of the most significant realisations emerging from the various solidarity movements is that, rather than limited to being a series of individual incidents perpetrated by outliers, violence against women and girls is systemic in nature, occurring across a range of settings and taking a multiplicity of forms”.
So, despite nonsensical movements such as #HimToo and #NotAllMen, the terrible truth is that it is #AllMen and the way all societies operate that impedes the just progress to equality.
As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes in her quick must-read, We Should All Be Feminists: “Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.”
As we drive awareness through another “day” to explain that girls are human too, women might be better off harnessing their growing rage to reboot the world in our image. Let’s stop fannying about – the truth is that men are the problem.
 |
| ||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
