International Day of the Girl Child – a day the United Nations launched some six years back to promote girl’s empowerment and fulfilment of their human rights, was recognized yesterday.
It also highlights the challenges girls all over the world face.
Yesterday morning at the Senate, Social Services Minister, Frankie Campbell shared the importance of The Bahamas joining in the celebrations.
“It is important on two fronts,” he said.
“One, it’s important that we are living up to an international convention that we’ve signed on to, but more importantly, and I always say, we don’t want to do the right thing for the wrong reasons,” he added.
“So we don’t want to do things like this for the benefit merely of a convention, we want to do it for our own people, and the convention will just find that we are in compliance.
“It is important that we empower our young girls and young women to be able to make consequential decisions, to be able to have the financial independence to allow them to remove themselves from a toxic situation or relationship if they want to and not be forced to stay because there is some financial dependence on the person who may be abusing them.
“It’s important to empower our young women just to be able to say no if they don’t want to.”
In honour of this year’s celebrations, the Senate released several balloons.
“What we did is we decided that, we had four orange balloons and orange is the color to bring awareness [for] violence against women,” said Senate President, Katherine Forbes-Smith.
“Pink, obviously we’re in breast cancer month and so we released seven balloons not just from the Senate but also in Grand Bahama at six schools,” she added.
“And the seven balloons represent the 700 islands and cays in the Bahamas and the girls that live within our country and that’s what we’re representing and commemorating today.”
According to the United Nations, this year alone, 12 million girls under 18 will be married, and 21 million girls aged 15 to 19 years will become pregnant in developing regions.
