The Girl Child: Still on the ‘platform’ – still missing the train
The Girl Child: Still on the ‘platform’ – still missing the train
This paper examines how policy, plans, programming and investment have changed the status, condition and prospects of the girl child in India since 1995, when the Government of India accepted the Beijing platform for Action “without reservations.” Prepared by the Women’s Coalition for peace and development, it is a contribution to the review and assessment of the girl child’s situation, for the Beijing Plus 10 review, in India and the South Asia region.
“One day,” says a verse in the Kor’an, “your un-born daughters will rise up out of the grave and ask you why you killed them.”
When will that day come? One day, just about six months from now, the UN Commission on the Status of Women will review what happened to the advancement of women and girls in the 10 years that have passed since the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, adopted the Platform for Action for the Advancement of Women.
Today, as the year for the decade audit gets under way, there is every chance that one primal fault of the 1995 decisions and the 2000 review will go uncorrected once again – and that is the neglect of the girl child.
Everyone confronted with the issue persists in treating girl children as a sub-category within women, or among children, or among youth. Fifty per cent is not a sub-category: it is half the issue. The world today has some 6 billion people. About half of them are female, and so the feminist slogan that ‘women hold up half the sky’ has won recognition. But ---and why do we not notice this ? --- in the developing nations that account for the majority of the world’s population, half of the people are children. And half of these children are girls.
In India, girls below 18 account for about 45 per cent of the total female population. They would account for a higher percentage if more of the youngest of them were allowed to survive. Deprived of equality and enabling opportunity throughout their childhood, the survivors grow into women desperately in need of empowerment. Why do they have to wait that long? This is a question for the State and the women’s movement alike.
Two critical questions arise. In the developed countries, the populations are aging. Governments are troubled by the cost of social security and protective services for the elderly, and communities and families see a rising problem in caring for the increasing number of old members. In the vastly more populous developing countries, the global South, the Third World, the LDCs, the debt-ridden poor hemisphere, the populations are young. Even where demographic transition has begun, they are still young. Giving the girl child her due on the human rights agenda is thus not an Indian question, but an issue of the South.
Should not the bald fact of young numbers influence international and regional policy and commitments as much as it does national decisions and investments? In planning for human or social development, should the composition of a population not determine where the money goes and how the development measures are designed and prioritised? Good questions. But there are no good answers. The Government of India takes pride in having pushed for a ‘girl child section’ in the Beijing PFA. It cannot take pride in its own national implementation of the nine objectives set out in that section; it has no successes to report. The Government of India also makes official declarations that it has the world’s largest child population. It has nothing much to declare on how it has secured the needs of those 400 million children – and especially the girls among them.
At the national level, the combination of age-blindness to the rights of female Indians, and gender-blindness to the needs of Indian children has seen to it that this country’s Beijing Plus 10 report cannot be anything but an indictment.
An NGO recommendatory process linked to the preparation of the Tenth Five-Year Plan set out age-wise concerns relating to girl children, and age-specific proposals to address them. The exercise itself taught the participating NGOs how differently the various rights and entitlements of the female person spell out at different stages of childhood and later life. The approach is logical, and helps to pinpoint actual interventions, but Indian planners show no signs of using it.
On the international plane, the decade review is well set to short-change the girl children of both South and North – unless India and other South nations move to correct the fault. For States and governments nations that do not really care what happens to girl children, and only adopt policies on woman to appease the feminist lobby, this sounds too much like unwanted hard work. Is India one such State?
Then what of civil society? At the just-concluded strategy meeting of South Asian NGOs in Kathmandu (Beyond Beijing Committee, 19-21 June 2004), participants associated with the Asia-Pacific Women’s Watch and South Asia Watch have examined the best way to carry their concerns forward into the Beijing Plus 10 review. The girl child figured on the Kathmandu agenda and has been flagged as a cross-cutting issue. On 30th June, the larger Asia-Pacific NGO Forum convenes in Bangkok. Will South Asia raise an effective voice for girl children there?
This now depends on how well South Asian NGOs who are in the B+10 process take it upon themselves to examine where the girl child stands in the PFA and B+5 commitments, and to re-position her in the new review.
This examination calls for an honest scanning of the entire PFA and B+5 outcome decisions to assess the ‘girl child impact’ of each of the 12 ‘critical areas of concern’ of 1995 and each priority of 2000. It also implies study of the Millennium Development Goals to see how the goals relating to women and to children have been addressed since 2000. These Goals (MDGs) set 2015 as a cut-off year. Alongside this, the rights of the girl child are also to be measured against the provisions of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and national reports on its implementation. Pending SAARC objectives from the near-invisible 1990-2000 regional Girl Child Decade, and other child-related SAARC commitments should also be revisited, to see how targets the region promised itself it would reach have been honoured.
This assessment effort should help to identify what needs to be done for the below-18 female person in the next 10 to 11 years. It cannot help but highlight what should have been done in the decade now ending.
A participatory process of consultation, information-sharing and joint review is a necessary investment to making this assessment as comprehensive and meaningful as it deserves to be. If NGOs and academics in each of the countries of South Asia can produce an objective assessment, the region which is home to the large contingent of the world’s children will have its report on gender injustice in childhood.
The next, and harder, task would be to obtain genuine commitment to making some of the changes the review identifies. At this threshold stage of the B+10 review process, it might be helpful if we understand and agree that the edifice of women’s empowerment cannot be constructed on a weak foundation; it has to begin at the beginning.
Women’s Coalition invites NGO interest in the issue of the girl child as a B+10 priority.
For more information please contact:
Women’s Coalition for Peace and Development
14 Jungpura – B
Mathura Road, New Delhi-110014
Ph: 011-24326025/ 011-24310959
Email: wecan03@yahoo.co.uk / wecan@bol.net.in
