As the fifth London Southbank Women of the World (WOW) festival came to a close on International Women’s Day, the audience of 2,500 was asked to imagine a world where girls and boys were treated equally across gender, race and class. The call came from Baroness Doreen Lawrence, a woman who has tirelessly campaigned for justice following the murder of her son Stephen in a racist attack in London in 1993. Broadcaster Sandi Toksvig, who hosted the event at London’s Royal Festival Hall, had asked us to imagine that Doreen was the Home Secretary in her new ‘Rescue Party’ feminist cabinet. The party would follow traditional lifeboat logic: women and children first.
Doreen rose to the imaginary occasion, opening her speech with the words, ‘as Home Secretary I will’. Recognising the equality of our young people, she told us, is something her government would prioritise; it is something, she added, that this government – and previous governments – have failed to achieve.
It was a powerful and rousing thought experiment for those of us who had heard much throughout the seven day feminist festival of the unprecedented horrors facing girls globally: from a high risk of suicide to sexual violence; from forced marriage to FGM. These are issues that have been extensively covered on openDemocracy 50.50. For as Lyric Thompson wrote in September last year, there is no demographic that has been more sorely overlooked by the international community, and whose rights and needs must be urgently addressed, than adolescent girls. As females and as young people, Lyric explains, adolescent girls face ‘multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination and vulnerability; their rights are doubly at risk.’
