Media Advisory No. 2006-68

 

Experts Meet at UNESCO

to Discuss Violence Against Girls in School

 

Paris, 20 November – International experts will meet at UNESCO Headquarters on 23 November to examine the problem of violence against girls in school and how it should be dealt with. Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, author of the recent United Nations Secretary-General’s Study on Violence against Children, will make the keynote address at the roundtable, which takes place on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.

 

The roundtable, will be opened by Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura and Michel Doucin, Ambassador for Human Rights, French Foreign Affairs Ministry (2 p.m., Room XII). The meeting will be divided into three panels that will focus on:

 

§        The role and responsibility of national and local public authorities, with presentations by Thelma Majela, head of the Guidance and Counselling Division at the Ministry of Education in Botswana, and Tuncay Ergene, Associate Professor, Hacettepe University, Turkey;

 

§        The role and responsibility of civil society and NGOs, with a presentation by Lucy Lake, deputy Executive Director and Director of Programmes, Campaign for female Education, United Kingdom, and Georges Fotinos, author of a study on violence in schools who will also talk specifically about the situation in France;

and

§        The role and responsibility of educational personnel, with Jacqueline Costa-Lascoux, Director of the Observatory for Immigration and Integration Statistics, France, and Elie Jouen, Deputy General Secretary of Education International.

 

Recent reports, including Mr Pinheiro’s study, the Secretary-General’s in-depth Study on Violence against Women, and the Education for All Global Monitoring report published by UNESCO,  show that gender-based violence in schools, often in the form of sexual violence and harassment, persists in all countries. It represents a generalized violation of human rights and a major obstacle to the achievement of Education for All: of the some 77 million children not enrolled in school, some 55 percent are girls.

 

The roundtable is organized by UNESCO, the French National Commission for UNESCO and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

 

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Journalists wishing to cover the Roundtable on School related Gender-Based Violence in the Context of Education for All, require accreditation from the Press relations Section. Contact: Isabelle Le Fournis, tel: +33 1 45 68 17 48 – i.le-fournis@unesco.org