image_pdf

In recent years, there has been a growing focus on girls’ vision for the future, one that emphasizes a world where all girls are protected, respected, and empowered. On the one hand, it is important to focus words and actions on the context of girls suffering from hunger, slavery and other extremely harmful problems. On the other hand, it is important to avoid an ethnocentric approach to these problems that hides the lack of respect and protection for girls in all world contexts.

In Western countries, most girls are coerced through sexual abuse as minors and also to have disdainful hooking up, at an increasingly earlier age, with the boys that will disdain them and their families forever. Scientific evidence has demonstrated that even five minutes sexual violence of this type have consequences for their mental and physical health during all their lives. Social networks, traditional media and institutions frequently collaborate with this coercion not only by making it invisible but even developing problems for official orientations to overcome sexual violence, but by promoting it.

Empowering girls brings about significant and immediate changes. When girls take on leadership roles, it strengthens families, enhances communities, and stimulates economic growth, ultimately leading to a more promising future. However, girls need to be free from any coercion and they are not now. It is a great opportunity to develop actions and words that promote this leadership and break the chains of coercive discourse.

[Image from freepik]

Pre-doctoral researcher at University of the Basque Country

By Ane Olabarria

Pre-doctoral researcher at University of the Basque Country