8 March! Don’t we love 8 March? It is that wonderful day during the course of which we internationally celebrate women! Women are pretty great. I know because I am one of them. Women are, however, not the only members of their gender. There are these other people called girls who are also pretty great. I know because I was one of them once, too. Girls are people who are wonderful and vulnerable in their own particular ways. This is why I am right on board for the theme for this, the 101st International Women’s Day, which is “Connecting Girls, Inspiring Futures”.
Now, the curious thing about this theme is that the agent in the phrase is unclear. Who is connecting the girls? Who is inspiring their futures? Implicitly, inevitably, adults are supposed to be the inspirations and the facilitators because mother knows best, don’t you know. Not especially so anymore, which is why “Connecting Girls, Inspiring Futures” is such a timely theme. There’s a big push lately to focus on the power of adolescent girls to change the world.
Perhaps you’ve heard of the kind of thing I’m talking about. There is, most famously, The Girl Effect, a idea launched as recently as the 2009 World Economic Forum. It’s not a campaign that works directly with teenage girls; rather, advocates have successfully campaigned to put adolescent girls on the agenda – especially the economic agenda – at meetings of the UN, the World Bank, the Clinton Global Initiative, and more. From the website’s FAQ page:
It has been shown that an educated girl will invest 90% of her future income in her family, compared to 35% for a boy. Yet 250 million adolescent girls live in poverty and are more likely than boys to be uneducated, married at a young age, and exposed to HIV/AIDS. Today, less than two cents of every international development dollar go to girls, the very people who could do the most to end poverty. As long as girls remain invisible, the world misses out on a tremendous opportunity for change.
Girls are particularly vulnerable: to sexual violence, to economic exploitation, to being undereducated, to just about any hardship of which you can think. They’re also often the ones to do a lot of the heavy lifting in their communities – and incredibly powerful potential agents for change.
Okay, that’s great, we know what to do. Empower girls and you help everybody. However, again, we run into the invisible agent: who is doing the empowering, and for whom? The thing is that a lot of harping on about the power of girls is from the top down and very much speaking over them. Also, I don’t know about you, but I’m a little squicked by framing girls as the marvellous angels working for their communities. That’s wonderful, truly it is, but it also plays into the idea of very gendered sacrifice for the greater good. How about everyone starts talking about empowering girls for their own sakes?
This is why organisations dedicated to girls are so important – and it’s why girls themselves need to be a part of that organising. There’s the Coalition for Adolescent Girls, which runs along similar lines to, and is in fact a part of, The Girl Effect. The Coalition is focused on legal reform, reorientation of health delivery systems, education, and building funding and economic assets designed to protect teenage girls. Just a week ago, in connection with the 56th session of the Commission on the Status of Women, rural adolescent girls were teaming up with UN delegates. Seventeen-year-old Elizabeth of Malawi noted that ‘Nothing can be done for girls if girls are not involved’.
There are also some amazing media projects facilitated by adults but functionally run by girls themselves. Plan International’s spotlight is on eliminating youth poverty, from funding microfinance to protecting children against violence. As part of their emphasis on youth involvement, they have a Girls Making Media Project, based in Ghana, Togo, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. Hundreds of thousands of people are being reached by girls making their own media about their own experiences. There’s also Guatemala’s Voces de Cambio, for which I’ve campaigned in the past. The only all girls after school program in the country, Voces de Cambio primarily uses writing and photography to imagine new ways for girls to direct their social placement.
One of the most important parts of such projects is that girls are organising and communicating with each other about their experiences and rights. Connection and inspiration for the future driven by girls themselves are quite as important as adult support. Girls are a whole lot more capable than their silly and inconsequential image, and they can do some amazing things. That’s why the fbomb blog, run by feminist teenagers, for feminist teenagers, has been so important and successful. Girls want to hear about what girls have to say rather than being told by adults how things ought to be. After all, it’s a little strange if adults, who are passing on vulnerability and inequality to girls, get to run the show here. More to the point, if we’re going to talk about the power of girls, well, they have their own ideas about the ways in which they are powerful and how they want to direct their potential.
As a group, girls have a tough time. They’re routinely figured as being without consequence, all the while being an intensely vulnerable social group occupying vital places in their communities. This year’s International Women’s Day focus on connecting girls is important because so often girls are spoken down to or spoken for. It’s vital to have girls building each other up and working in their own ways. Adults can help inspire those futures, but girls are connecting and building their dreams themselves.