A young girl selling toys in Vietnam. guru krishnan/Flickr. (CC 2.0 by-nc)
In 1995, the United Nations Conference on Women’s Beijing Platform for Action identified ‘the girl child’ as one of its twelve ‘critical areas for concern’. In the two decades that have followed, vulnerable girls have come to be almost universally regarded as key symbols of vulnerability, victimisation, exploitation, and exclusion. Such portrayals have undoubtedly helped to generate popular and political concern, but these concerns have too often been based on models of the ‘innocence’ of childhood and girlhood, together with an obsessive concern with sexual purity and sexual violation. As we shall see, this obsession with sexual purity tends to result in a limited diagnosis that sidelines the analysis of larger patterns of culpability and complicity. This limitation has, in turn, meant that efforts to protect the ‘girl child’ have too often ended up upholding a vision of the world in which ‘the west’ acquires legitimacy via ritualised condemnations of ‘the rest’.
There is no question that girls require support from activists and governments around the world. Many are ‘missing’ – unregistered at birth or, more often, unborn because of selective abortion. They are more likely than boys to die in infancy, early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence because of malnutrition, lack of medical care, early childbearing, and domestic and sexual violence. Their rights are not explicitly accounted for in either the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women or the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). In the recently released UN Sustainable Development Goals, girls are mentioned only as part of the phrases ‘women and girls’ or ‘girls and boys’, with the exception of a single reference to adolescent girls’ nutrition as part of nutrition and pregnancy.
