October 11 is commemorated the world over as the year of the ‘Girl Child’.The International Day of the Girl Child was first focused on, at the Beijing Declaration in 1995 at the World Conference on Women in Beijing. It was the first-ever event to have identified the need for addressing issues faced by adolescent girls around the world.
Sixteen years later, on December 19, 2011, United Nations General Assembly adopted the Resolution to declare October 11 as the International Day of the Girl Child, to recognize girls’ rights and the unique challenges girls face around the world.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, in his message for this year’s commemoration of ‘Rights of the Girl Child’ highlighted the fact that girls continue to confront a myriad of challenges to fulfilling their potential; made worse by concurrent crises of climate change, COVID-19 and humanitarian conflict.
Girls around the world continue to face unprecedented challenges to their education, their physical and mental wellness, and the protections needed for a life without violence. Secretary General Guterres emphasized that the COVID-19 pandemic had worsened existing burdens on girls around the world.
Ten years after attention first began to be focused on the rights of girls, the aspiration of equal rights for women and girls has sadly remained limited.
By a strange twist of coincidence, on October 10, 2022, local media reported police in our country took into custody a 15-year-old bride and her 19-year-old groom during their wedding reception.
Whether the actions of the police and the National Child Protection Authority (NCPA), which initiated police involvement while the wedding ceremony was in progress, served the interests of the young couple is questionable. The sensationalist style of reporting of the event and the undue publicity given to the sad incident via the media was deplorable.
Was the young couple who were coerced into marrying each other via peer pressure at fault? Or weren’t the adults equally culpable? Under what law were the youngsters taken into police custody? And who ordered them to be arrested like common criminals? What was particularly appalling about this particular child marriage, is that the victims - the children were arrested.
Child marriages have been among the major concerns of the United Nations focusing attention and the declaration of a particular date to commemorate the girl child.
According to the UN, up to 10 million girls are at risk of child marriage. The profound effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are putting girls at higher risk of early marriage due to a combination of economic shocks, school closures and interruptions in reproductive health services.
In our own country, our sister paper ‘The Sunday Times’ reported in March this year quoting the NCPA, reported the number of child abuse complaints filed had skyrocketed to 11,187 in 2021, from an average of 8,500 complaints over the past 10 years (1,332 cases of alleged sexual abuse have been reported in 2020 of which 947 are related to sexual harassment, 246 sexual abuse and 123 incidents of rape). ‘Groundviews’ reports there were 2,055 child abuse cases, including 1,953 rape cases, in 2020 but police failed to secure a single conviction.
More recently organizers of protest movements have been urging participants in demonstrations to bring along toddlers, babes-in-arms and children to protest sites. In the heat of events, these little ones could fall victim to ensuing clashes between protestors and the forces of the state. Judging from actions such as these, a stranger/foreigner could not be blamed if he/she believed Lanka is a nation which cares tuppence for its children.
While we are facing monumental issues today, and perhaps need to take to the streets to highlight our problems, let us not hide behind the innocence of little children. Let us remember that non-white citizens of South Africa faced a far worse situation under the apartheid regime in that country. They (South Africans) overcame these problems without holding up their children as human shields during demonstrations against the state.
Tactics such as these, put our country to shame. It will do the pseudo leaders who call for the endangering of little children, to take a lesson from the words of Nelson Mandela who during the anti-apartheid struggle said: “Our children are the rock on which our future will be built, our greatest asset as a nation. They will be the leaders of our country, the creators of our national wealth who care for and protect our people...he added, “...the true character of society is revealed in how it treats its children...”
