Women Only. Girls Forbidden.

by Janet Nelson

I moved to New York on April Fool’s Day, 1990, to take the lead in mobilizing NGOs around the World Summit for Children – at the time, the largest gathering in history of heads of State. It was an exciting period – the Convention on the Rights of the Child had just been adopted by the General Assembly, and we were full of optimism that we could make the world a better place for children.

That Summit was then followed by a series of world conferences in which we continued to lobby for our priorities, in partnership with a wide range of NGOs: the Vienna Conference on Human Rights in 1993, the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, the Copenhagen Summit on Social Development and the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, both in 1995. (I wasn’t involved in the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio in 1992).

The Vienna Conference was particularly important, because it really brought home the challenge we faced in making children a priority for governments as well as major civil society movements. At a side event we helped to organize on the rights of women and girls, a group of women began to chant “No children, no children, no children,” under the assumption that UNICEF saw women mainly as caregivers for children. So with Misrak Elias, the Gender Adviser, we set out to make sure that the Plan of Action that was already being negotiated for the Beijing Conference would recognize that women could enjoy equal rights only if their rights as girls had been respected. Gender discrimination begins at birth (or even before!), and not at 18. We reached out to women’s NGOs in developing countries as well as members of the powerful Women’s Caucus in the US, with the strong support of Stephen Lewis, the new charismatic Deputy Director of UNICEF. (A particularly colourful and supportive ally was Bella Abzug, who had just co-founded the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), and was an important voice in the US women’s movement.) UNICEF offices also lobbied with their government counterparts. As a result of these joint efforts, by the time the draft Plan of Action was presented to the Beijing Conference, it included an entire chapter on the girl child – a first in the series of women’s conferences.

It was an exciting breakthrough!

Comments

Post a Comment