WUNRN
2010 STATE OF THE WORLD'S GIRLS REPORT
Because I Am a Girl
DIGITAL & URBAN FRONTIERS
The report examines the dangers
and opportunities for girls in cities and online
Because I am a Girl: The State of the World's Girls 2010
- Digital and Urban Frontiers is the fourth in a series of annual reports
published by Plan examining the rights of girls throughout their childhood,
adolescence and as young women.
Focusing on two of the 21st
century's fastest growing areas - the boom in city populations and the
explosion of IT and communication technology, the report looks at the prospects
and perils facing girls.
While there are great
opportunities, prejudice and poverty is excluding millions of girls from taking
advantages of the possibilities on offer.
Urban poverty, lack of proper
housing and sexual harassment can make many girls feel unsafe. Cyberspace can
also be hazardous - a hunting ground for traffickers and bullies.
The report argues that girls need
to be able to gain the skills to protect themselves and to recognise both the
threats and the opportunities that await them on the city streets and online.
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/teenage-girls-can-change-the-world/article1712789/
WORKING URBAN TEENAGE GIRLS - AGENTS & VICTIMS OF CHANGE
September 18,
2010
TEENAGE GIRLS -
By Doug
Saunders
Globe and Mail
The Alam family lives in one of the more squalid corners
of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, and make their living in a pretty typical
way: by deploying their teenaged daughters.
Each morning, 14-year-old Panchali walks down the mud
lanes to her house-cleaning job in the nearby high-rise apartments, and
16-year-old Amolika goes out to spend 10 hours at a garment factory. Their
brother, Sumon, 17, has a far less rewarding job unloading trucks and carrying
heavy objects on bamboo poles, as does his father.
Together, the two teenage girls earn about three-quarters
of the family's income. That's not unusual here, or in any of the fast-growing
cities of Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America: These places are the
domain of the adolescent girl.
What you see in the streets and workshops and houses of
the fast-growing parts of the world are young women, generally under 21,
working hard. What you see aboard the trains and minivan-buses and horse-carts
of the world are teenage girls, moving to the city.
As in Europe in the 19th century, young women often make
up the largest group of people leaving villages for the city, sent to work
alone, often in domestic service or garment piecework, and save their families.
Half the world's urban population is under 25, and considerably more than half
of these are young women, because the men so often stay behind.
The girls tend to have more job opportunities in the
informal, hustle-based economies of modern cities; they also tend to be treated
far, far worse than anyone else, abused sexually, mutilated, impregnated,
forced into prostitution, married to strangers. They are both the main agents
of change and its predominant victim.
The opportunity and the danger tend to amplify each
other. Fear of such fates, and other mythic images of debased innocence stoked
by the terrifying shock of sudden change, leads the fathers and brothers of
newly urbanized daughters into the hysterical comfort of extreme religious and
political beliefs. The cruel ascetic offshoots of Islam in much of the Arab
world, the violent political perversions of Hinduism in India and the waves of
fundamentalist Christianity across the Southern Hemisphere, are in large part
responses to, or manipulations of, anxieties over the idealized images of one's
daughter.
In fact, you could say that the most potent forces in the
world right now - both the most promising opportunities for improvement and the
most menacing and destabilizing movements and ideologies - are all centred
around the mythic figure of the teenage girl.
This dual role will be brought into stark contrast next
week with the release of a major study, by the charity Plan, of the situation
of adolescent girls in the world's cities. Titled "Because I Am a
Girl," it rightly recognizes that the fate of these girls and young women
is precisely the fate of their countries and communities.
In many ways, the flight into urban work is turning girls
into powerful figures - in large part by letting them escape marriage. In
Bangladesh, the study notes, 31 per cent of adolescent girls who had migrated
from rural to urban areas for work were married by the age of 18, compared to
71 per cent in rural areas, and "adolescent girls in cities are more
likely than their rural cousins to go to school, marry later, give birth more
safely and have more of a say in their own lives."
And this flight often allows them to escape a fate that
would turn them into baby-making machines: In Addis Ababa, a quarter of all
women in the city between 10 and 19 had moved there from the village in order
to escape early marriage.
That can change the world: Over and over, studies have
found that the level of poverty reduction and economic growth in a country is
directly correlated to the levels of education attained by women - more so than
any other factor.
But the risks are real. Sexual predation is an
ever-present concern in societies that still treat women little better than
livestock. A study in Lima found that 41 per cent of girls between 10 and 24
had "experienced coerced sex." Similar figures, or worse, were found
around the world.
The flip side of this risk is the ideological
defensiveness that leads fathers to marry off daughters earlier, cover their
heads (even in countries, such as Bangladesh and Turkey, where this isn't
traditional), mutilate their genitals and throw them into the hands of
religion. Of course, this is the same thinking that leads men to rape teenage
girls - thus creating a self-sustaining cycle of backwardness.
Beyond this idealization and victimization are the actual
lives of hundreds of millions of real girls, on the streets of the world's
major cities, avoiding dark corners and doing most of the hard work.