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39. The girl child of today is the woman of tomorrow. The skills, ideas and energy of the girl child are vital for full attainment of the goals of equality, development and peace. For the girl child to develop her full potential she needs to be nurtured in an enabling environment, where her spiritual, intellectual and material needs for survival, protection and development are met and her equal rights safeguarded. If women are to be equal partners with men, in every aspect of life and development, now is the time to recognize the human dignity and worth of the girl child and to ensure the full enjoyment of her human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the rights assured by the Convention on the Rights of the Child,/11 universal ratification of which is strongly urged. Yet there exists world-wide evidence that discrimination and violence against girls begin at the earliest stages of life and continue unabated throughout their lives. They often have less access to nutrition, physical and mental health care and education and enjoy fewer rights, opportunities and benefits of childhood and adolescence than do boys. They are often subjected to various forms of sexual and economic exploitation, paedophilia, forced prostitution and possibly the sale of their organs and tissues, violence and harmful practices such as female infanticide and prenatal sex selection, incest, female genital mutilation and early marriage, including child marriage.
Beijing Declaration (1995)
The background of understanding and acknowledgement within the Beijing Declaration, and in considerate and evidence-based discussions of gender-based discrimination, is the state of affairs in history with women as property or less than men while the context for men being bad too. The nature of the relationship between the sexes as one of ratios with some forms of discrimination more negative for men than for women – which need vigorous tackling – and other, often many more, for women than for men.
Differences between the sexes, a la biological species, exist; biological differences bound to ideas about, intuitive identifications of, self-concepts of, and manifestations of gender. Similarly, biology emerges from environment and genetics with a variation of heritability by the factor of biology taken into account, whether physiological, psychological, or behavioral – as fact and not as the basis for the oppression of others.
Some groups emphasize naturalisms’ truisms, e.g., biological sex, as a category and not as an act, seen in most species. Others point to sociological truisms, e.g., oppression of women. Both are true. Freedom exists but leashed, because we live as organisms and not angels, in the famous formulation. Thus, we should deal with the world rather than, purely, our ideas about the world.
With history and statistical backgrounds, we can begin to take the new international evidence about discrimination to deal with the real world around us; the ways in which to solve or ameliorate the problems in the modern context, especially in the light of evidence-denial across the political spectrum, within religious and secular communities, and bound in the breakdown of dialogue seen in the stereotyping and abstracting of individuals – as if not human.
The statement within the global community continues to be the work in the proverbial pipeline of assistance to women with the work to include girls in the plans for national and international development, especially as regards implementation of rights, access to education, and, subsequently, opportunities in work. The purpose is for the work on the young to yield benefits over the long term.
For many, the spiritual needs are highly important and should be respected, even if secular looking at the lives of the religious or if the modern types who identify as SBNRs or spiritual but not religious. Based on this document, the extension of consideration of the, according to the individual or group, spiritual needs, whether formally religious or not, of women is important and deserves to be respected. This is part of equal rights.
If a secular individual or a person from another faith believe in the violation of an individual’s freedom of religion and belief, e.g., the current vogue in some secular, in the terms of Lyotard, metanarratives is the inevitable decline and elimination of religion or faith – and the faster the better according to this tiny segment – & reflection of this seen in the hopes for the cleansing of the Earth with the Rapture with the Second Coming of Christ where the faithful are flown to heaven and the damned thrust to hell, then I do not stand with them on this.
As the rights documents stipulate on the equality, there exists freedom of religion and, by implicit implication, freedom from religion, not my place to determine another person’s independent choice of narrative and journey for their life path. The point of the intellectual provisions is akin to this with the inclusion of the rights of the women in primary, secondary, and postsecondary education to prevent the limiting of their intellects in any way.
Next is the material resources, this is in line with the basic equality of women in financial domains, especially with the long history of no access to economic independence for women. All three – spiritual, intellectual, and material – as important for the fulfillment of the implementation of equal rights. For equality with the men, “in every aspect of life and development,” the comprehension of women as persons with the full spectrum of statistical expectations of rotten behavior and gross thoughts to the heights of virtue and admirability in conduct and speech.
The intention of equality of rights comes in the form of respect for the entire lifecycle and the respect for fundamental human rights of women and girls, as persons, and deserving of the same fundamental freedoms as the men. We can see the ways in which women, and poor men, tend to be the recipients of non-rights, the refusal of the provision of rights, or the stripping of rights from them.
It is particularly egregious in the cases of the abuse of children throughout the world, which is important in the recognition of the dignity and work of every girl; for the girls to be able to fulfill their potentials, they deserve the equivalent rights and freedoms as the boys, and protections too. This is the purpose of the paragraph mentioning the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Within this “world-wide evidence,” the other stage, as discussed in some of the Social Interest Group calls, is the violence against women – and girls. The poorer, the younger, and the female are good metrics for seeing the level of violence against people. Women undergo far more violence than many of the men in the world. Men are more often conscripted, especially poor and minority men within nations.
But the physical violence and sexual violence, around the world, is tragically committed far more often against the women than the men, with the physical violence against women, statistically speaking, by men – or even the female genital mutilation by the elder women forced, against consent and while girls, on the young women. Certainly, we sit witness to darkness, pain, and suffering around the world; however, this continues to decline in many, many regards in spite of these tragic aspects of life.
The impacts on women can be seen in the “lack of access to nutrition, physical and mental health care and education” with fewer rights implemented to boot. Where is the equality there? How are men, generally speaking, more denied basics in life than women? The statistics and international documents remain clear, as a general heuristic and statistical phenomenon, about the disproportionate denial and deprivation of girls and women, compared to boys and men.
Some of the more tragic are the forms of combined exploitation – sexual with economic – happening to girls and young women who become used as simply pieces of flesh for use, and abuse, by men, more often. This can come in the cases of pedophilia and prostitution without consent. This sounds like paid sexual assault to me. Chris Hedges seems morally correct to condemn the sociocultural left and the economic libertarians on the issue of abuse and degradation of the bodies and impoverishment of the psychic and emotional lives of women and girls through sex trafficking, pedophilia, forced prostitution, and, as seen pervasively, in pornography in some of its forms.
Women can even be subject to the “sale of their organs and tissues.” It is a long line of identifiable and, as best as can be done circa 1995 or even now, cataloging and statistically analyzing the levels of the violations of women physically, psychologically, and sexually. About 750 million women and girls who have been married to this day have been married prior to the age of consent, or age 18, and so have been enforced into a monogamy of child marriage. More than 200 million women and girls have been subject to female genital mutilation, which dwarves the amount for male genital mutilation (back to ratios).
All these violations through history and lived with into the present are the current generations’ plight. The reduction of these through preventative measures are the means by which to ensure these trends of improved respect for the inherent dignity and worth of individual human beings. This will only be coming with diligence, hard work, solidarity, sympathy, and coalitions without too much fussing about national borders as these rights represent the species – as a statistical universal proposition of ethics. Interestingly, it expands the sphere of the Golden Rule seen in most main faiths to women and girls alongside the men and the boys.
It is something we all share on that plane.
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- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the Preamble, Article 16, and Article 25(2).
- Convention Against Discrimination in Education (1960) in Article 1.
- The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) in Article 3, Article 7, and Article 13.
- International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966).
- Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979).
- Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984).
- The Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (1993).
- Beijing Declaration(1995).
- United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000).
- Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children (2000).
- The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa or the “Maputo Protocol” (2003).
- Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence or the Istanbul Convention (2011) Article 38 and Article 39.
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Photo by Sai De Silva on Unsplash