A much needed International Day of the Girl

[redqueen]

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/10/20121010614437332.html

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The insecurity of being a girl

The Viejó case is, sadly, neither rare nor specific to Ecuador. According to UN Women, half of sexual assaults globally are committed against girls under 16. The World Health Organisation estimates that in 2002 alone, 150 million girls under the age of 18 suffered some form of sexual violence.

In the US, 83 per cent of girls experienced some form of sexual harassment in public schools, and Canadian statistics reveal that 64 per cent of all reported sexual assaults are against children.

Girls are sexually abused by school-principals, teachers and classmates. Medical research conducted by Human Rights Watch in South Africa found that almost 38 per cent of victims identified a schoolteacher or principal as their rapist. Schools are not exactly safe places for girls.

The pervasiveness of violence against girls led the United Nations to declare the International Day of the Girl. In the wake of the 2006 Secretary-General Study on Violence Against Children, the UN appointed a Special Representative on the issue, and in 2009 the International Girl Child Conferencein The Hague stressed the importance of gender inequalities among children. The failure to respond to violence against girls expresses the political tolerance vis-à-vis such crimes and international efforts are increasingly geared at changing social inertia.

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[niyad]

1. k and r

[ismnotwasm]

2. On my God

He never signed protocols, no teacher ever objected, and the mother never knew anything. The girl said that her rapist threatened to kill her mother if she talked and the abuse went on for months. It is only when she passed out in school that medical exams revealed she was pregnant.

As rapes often are, this case is embedded in power inequalities, socio-economic as well as political. First, Viejó raped the child of his subaltern, a low-income single-mother living in rudimental conditions. He abused a girl of lower social class whose education he sponsored in an institution he directed.

Second, the accused benefits from political authority as the father of the minister coordinating non-renewable resources and strategic sector, aggravating gender and class inequalities in access to justice.

Threats and economic pressure almost had the mother abandon the case. Fired from her job, with her two children expelled from school and a newborn to care for, the mother started peeling garlic to afford the $30 monthly rent.

The case would have gone unnoticed was it not for coverage by El Universo, the pariah newspaper of Ecuador, stirring up feminist networks and the pro-bono support from the Bar Association of Guayas. Pedro Granja, one of the five lawyers on the case, denounced the immobility of the criminal procedures starting a second lawsuit for the recognition of paternity and a pension.

There are no words. Thank God for feminists everywhere