Girls are our future. This year, for the fourth annual International Day of the Girl Child, on 11 October, join global efforts to ensure a world free of discrimination for young women and girls.
This year’s theme focuses on adolescent girls and the Sustainable Development Goals, which set a range of international targets, including on gender equality, to be achieved by 2030.
As a particularly vulnerable demographic, adolescent girls face social, economic and political barriers. While they hold the potential to become leaders and effect change, their empowerment can be hindered by factors such as unwanted pregnancy, forced early marriage, gender-based violence and limited access to higher education and reproductive health services.
Cirencester plans to talk to many of the local primary schools about the issues facing women and girls across the world.
Some further reading……………
About the Day
Since 2012, the United Nations marks 11 October as the ‘International Day of the Girl Child’. The day promotes girls’ human rights, highlights gender inequalities that remain between girls and boys and addresses the various forms of discrimination and abuse suffered by girls around the world.
- One in three women and girls experience abuse in their lifetime.
- More than half of sexual assaults are committed against girls under 16 years of age.
- Globally, more than one in three young women aged 20-24 years are married before the age of 18.