Prior to the pandemic, girls' enrollments in school had seen significant improvements in Asia. But with the pandemic, those gains have been wiped out.

UNESCO estimates that about 24 million learners, from pre-primary to university level, are at risk of not returning to school following the education disruption.

Almost half of them are found in South and West Asia besides Africa.

Asia was doing well prior to the pandemic, having brought down the number of girls out of school from 30 million to 15 million in the last two decades.

Almost all Asian countries with the exception of Pakistan and Timor-Leste had fared well by sending girls to schools.

In fact, with more girls in schools, Asia had posted decreasing trends in child marriage prior to the pandemic.

With the pandemic playing spoilsport, it will be difficult to sustain the tempo.

With an estimated 200,000 more girls experiencing child marriage in South Asia in 2020, the figures are expected to skyrocket as the ordeal from the pandemic is still lingering in many Asian nations.

Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India is mulling raising the marriage age from 18 to 21 for girls, but the move has proved difficult to implement in a country of 1.3 billion people.

A parliamentary panel report, which focused on the empowerment of women through education, observed the probability of more adolescent girls opting out of school permanently is high.

The report said that girls away from school will end up doing household tasks and providing childcare due to the economic hardships of their families.

Though the panel has recommended targeted scholarships, conditional cash transfers, provision of bicycles, access to smartphones and hostel facilities to woo girls back to school, going by India's track record in looking after the welfare of its marginalized, these sops may remain only on paper.

In Vietnam, the legal age to wed is 18, but UNICEF said one in 10 girls is married before that age. Tying the nuptial knot early is mainly prevalent among ethnic groups in the communist country.

Asia is known for its migrant workers.

But the pandemic caused job losses and many are stuck at home.

When family members are hit by Covid-19, the onus of looking after patients falls on girls. So at home, care responsibilities have dramatically increased for girls who were forced to skip classes due to their ethnic minority status.

The cost of school fees was identified as a major barrier to girls' education in Asia.

With a bleak economic future awaiting their parents combined with existing attitudes that devalue girls' education, more girls are being taken out of school forever in Asia.

University students are most affected due to the tuition costs related to their studies.

Pre-primary education comes next.

While Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and to a greater extent India are on track to achieve gender parity in primary education, Pakistan and Afghanistan are woefully lagging.

Those girls who will be spared the tyranny of early motherhood have already assumed the new role of child labourers.

These young hands are going to do more harm than good to the existing labour market in Asia which is facing the problem of plenty as the pandemic rendered many migrant workers jobless.

This excess supply of girl labourers will further reduce the bargaining power of men and women working in unorganized sectors such as construction and garment-making.

At home, these girls become an easy target for family violence.

Heightened calls to helplines were reported in Singapore, Malaysia and India after the pandemic hit.

In Vietnam, domestic violence has doubled since Covid-related measures were introduced.

Education was the last resort for many Asian girls to lead a respectable and meaningful life.

What they need is a compassionate treatment to help them wade through the new normal.

The tiny Catholic Church in Asia, which claims to have pioneered modern education in most Asian nations, could play a vital role to change the fate of Asian girls and society itself.

But that can happen only if the hierarchy becomes aware of the challenges to the mission.

• Ben Joseph is a journalist of more than two decades of experience. Ben worked with leading publications like the New Indian Express, Deccan Chronicle, Business Standard, Times of India and Muscat Daily. He writes about Asian politics and human rights issues.
• First published in UCANews. Republished with permission.

The men who took them forced the girls to convert to Islam.

"We were walking back to our house after working on the farm when men in a car came out of nowhere and dragged us in with them," said Suneeta, who is Hindu and lives in Badin, a small city in the south of Pakistan. "The next thing we knew, we were in a shrine being forced to say the kalma (acceptance of Islam) by a cleric."

The men who kidnapped the girls told their mother to pay the equivalent of $365 — an enormous amount for the poor farming family — or the men would marry off the girls.

Their mother begged and borrowed from within the Hindu community and paid the ransom. She got her girls back.

The family considers itself lucky.

Every year, thousands of Hindu and Christian girls and young women are kidnapped in Pakistan and forcibly married, disappearing from their families. And while these forced conversions have been going on for decades, a recent surge in reported cases has brought the issue back into the limelight.

Around 1,000 cases of Hindu and Christian girls being forced to convert were estimated in the province of southern Sindh alone in 2018, according to the annual report of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

There are no concrete numbers for the rest of the conservative country, which is around 96 percent Muslim.

"This appears to be a systematic, organized trend and it needs to be seen in the broader context of the coercion of vulnerable girls and young women from communities that are already marginalized by their faith, class and socioeconomic status," said Mehdi Hasan, chairperson of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. "The ugly reality of forced conversions is that they are not seen as a crime, much less as a problem that should concern ‘mainstream' (Muslim) Pakistan."

In the majority of these cases, the girls are under 18. And while marriage under the age of 18 is illegal in Pakistan, the law is often ignored.

Meanwhile, there is no law banning forced conversions.

Child advocates say there is a clear lack of will by the government to tackle the problem.

"The government has done little in the past to stop such forced marriages," the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said in its annual report. "(The executive branch) asked lawmakers to pass effective legislation to end the practice," the report added, but nothing happened.

Meanwhile, the parents of victims are often ignored by authorities and have few options, say civil rights activists.

"Injustice is being done … and there is no one here to listen to these poor people," said Veeru Kohli, a human rights activist based in Sindh. "I've lost count of the number of cases that have come up every month."

One case that made it to court was that of Shalet Javed, 15, a Christian from the city of Faisalabad in the east of Pakistan, who was kidnapped, raped, forcibly converted and married to a Muslim man in February.

"They forced me to become Muslim and married me off to a man named Zafar," she told the Lahore High Court in April during a hearing on a complaint of kidnapping filed by her father, Javed Masih. "I ran off from the house where they kept me, and now I want to live with my parents.

"I am still a Christian," she added.

Locals from Sindh province say that one reason the practice not only persists but is escalating is that powerful officials run the Muslim shrines and seminaries where Muslim clerics are converting and marrying off these girls.

They are shielded by the government, which is afraid of upsetting them in the tense, often volatile environment of Pakistani politics, in which an attack on a religious figure is seen as an attack on Islam and liable to draw out extremists.

Kohli, meanwhile, said the conversions operate like a factory assembly line.

"With the number of cases and with the impunity these cases have, it is evident that the forced conversions (are) a business being run like a factory," she said.

Mian Abdul Haq, also known as Mian Mitho, a local political and religious leader in Sindh, is allegedly responsible for numerous forced conversions of girls, according to victims' families and activists.

Speaking about a recent case in which two Hindu sisters, Reena Meghwar, 12, and Raveena Meghwar, 14, were abducted, converted and married off to Muslim men in Ghotki in Sindh, he said the girls voluntarily switched faiths.

"They wanted to convert, it was their own free will, and there is no point in stopping those who want to embrace Islam," said Mitho.

Mitho denied accusations that Hindu girls are being targeted for conversion.

"Boys also convert, there are entire villages that convert," he said. "This is just a conspiracy against Islam that Hindu girls are being forced to convert. They all convert on their own."

Meanwhile, the case of the Meghwar sisters has ignited a debate across Pakistan about the issue.

After the girls were taken, their father, Hari Daas, tried in vain to get authorities to act. When that failed, out of frustration, he tried to burn himself alive in protest but was stopped before he could do serious injury to himself.

The government reacted, filing a complaint on kidnapping charges. However, when the girls were brought to the court with their husbands, they gave statements saying they married and converted without coercion.

The Islamabad High Court sent the girls home with their husbands.

"This is where the problem lies — girls in all these cases are threatened, and they will only give these kinds of statements," said Kohli, who also said courts are not enforcing laws barring underage marriage.

"These so-called marriages are illegal and so are the conversions," Kohli added.

As a result of the kidnappings and conversions, thousands of Hindus seek asylum in India every year. Others are thinking about it.

"We were saved once from the abduction but I am afraid that it will happen again to us," said Suneeta, the 16-year-old who was kidnapped with her sister. "What if this time they come for us and there is no one to bring us back. We are not safe here in our own country."

Research has consistently shown that positive adult role models can contribute to the health, education, and overall well-being of young people.

Albert Bandura has argued that children learn how to "perform" adult roles by observing the behavior of prominent adults in their lives and trying to imitate it.

Other research has shown that this is especially the case when it comes to learning gender roles.

When children see a behavior modeled exclusively by men or by women, they internalize that behavior as distinctly masculine or feminine.

The more children see positions of power occupied only by men, the more they come to think of leadership as an exclusively masculine role.

As leaders occupy a place of higher social status, this can implicitly generate an association between gender, leadership, and self-confidence.

In our new book, She Preached the Word: Women's Ordination in Modern America (Oxford University Press), we ask whether the presence of prominent female religious congregational leaders in the lives of girls and young women affects their self-worth and empowerment later in life.

According to the General Social Survey, nine out of ten Americans report attending religious services at least occasionally in their youth.

This means that places of worship are a key setting in which children and young people have the opportunity to observe leadership in action.

To investigate this question, we fielded a nationwide telephone and internet survey that asked respondents how often the religious leaders they had growing up were men or women, as well as whether their most influential congregational leader was a man or a woman.

One of our most striking findings is that women who had female congregational leaders in their youth enjoyed higher levels of self-esteem as adults.

Women who said they never had a female religious leader growing up are 10% less likely to agree that they "have high self-esteem" now as adults, and 30% less likely to "strongly" agree, compared to women who had female clergy at least "some of the time."

(In contrast, the same is not true for men. Men who had female congregational leaders frequently growing up have levels of self-esteem that are just as high as those who never had a female pastor or priest.)

This is important because low self-esteem has been linked to higher levels of depression and anxiety as well as lower levels of relationship success, job satisfaction, and motivation for personal improvement.

It is also important because women, on average, consistently report lower levels of self-esteem than men. In our research, we found that this is the case only for the 60% or so of Americans who report that they never had a female religious leader growing up.

When women had female clergy at least "some of the time" growing up in their congregations, their reported levels of self-esteem are consistently just as high as men's.

That's not all. Continue reading

• Image: RNS

In her book Princess Recovery: A How-to Guide to Raising Strong, Empowered Girls Who Can Create Their Own Happily Ever Afters, Hartstein writes that the traditional princess narrative "may be teaching your daughter everything from ‘only appearances matter' to ‘don't expect to rely on yourself—you'll need a prince to rescue you.' "

Expose her to too much Cinderella, Aladdin, or Sleeping Beauty, in other words, and your daughter may become a kind of princess herself, obsessed with beauty and uninterested in her own autonomy.

The classic Disney princess is, in Hartstein's view, not only gratuitously airy, helpless, and (save for Belle in the Beauty and the Beast) vacuous, but a threat to the healthy development of the millions of girls who worship at her pink, saccharine altar.

Her theory isn't original; it appears more or less in nearly every parenting book with a feminist bent, from Peggy Orenstein's 2012 Cinderella Ate my Daughter to last year's What Should We Tell Our Daughters? by British journalist Melissa Benn.

Despite its ubiquity, anti-princess dogma is grossly out of step with the times.

The truth is that fairy tales, though once ardent protectors and proliferators of gendered convention, are now, surprisingly, quite the opposite.

This decade's most popular fairy-tale features with heroines at their centre—Shrek, Brave and Frozen, to name a few—are actually blatant departures from the prince-rescues-princess norm.

In Brave (2012), Scottish princess and seasoned archer Merida sets off on a quest to avoid betrothal—and changes her stuffy medieval society in the process.

In the insanely popular Academy Award-winner Frozen (2013), not one but two heroines defy convention in their icy kingdom, and in this month's Maleficent, Disney's reimagination of Sleeping Beauty, Angelina Jolie plays the story's infamous sorceress as a complex, intensely likeable character, whose evildoing is warranted and, eventually, rectified. Continue reading

Source

• Emma Teitel in MacLean's

Emma Teitel is an award winning journalist who writes about women's issues and popular culture.

In her new book, When Boys Become Boys, Judy Y. Chu reports on her two-year study in which she followed a group of boys from pre-kindergarten through first grade.

She concluded that most of what we think of as "boy" behaviour isn't natural or authentic to boys, but is something they learn to perform.

Boys aren't stoic or aggressive or hierarchical; they aren't bad at forming relationships or unable to express themselves.

They pick up all these traditional traits of masculinity by adapting to a culture that expects and demands that they do so.

I interviewed Chu about gender roles, relationships, and how boys become boys.

The primary cultural forces you discuss in your book seems to be the boys themselves and their peer group. So it seems like they become boys through learning from other boys; it's boys teaching themselves to be boys. So where do you see the inauthenticity or unnaturalness there?

It's not as though they're arriving in their interactions having come from an isolated place.

They're hearing messages from older siblings, from media, or some of the boys' parents were more conventional in terms of the messages that they were telling them.

So they were hearing messages about masculinity and bringing them to their peer group context. Continue reading.

Source: The Atlantic

Image: Exposure

Suddenly Durga heard screams and huddled on the floor. Acting on a tip, police stormed the apartment in the heart of Bangalore. When they broke the door down, Durga crossed her arms in front of her chest and closed her eyes. She was only wearing a pair of panties — that's all the clothing that her owners had allowed her to have. Durga says: "I was ashamed."

One of the men wrapped the small girl in a sheet and brought her to a hospital. Doctors treated her for a number of days. In addition to her burns, she was malnourished, infected wounds covered her fingers and her lips were scarred. "I dropped a glass once," says Durga, "and the woman got angry and pulled my fingernails out, one by one." Sometimes they poked her in the mouth with a needle. Durga was supposed to work, not speak.

It's estimated that millions of children in India live as modern-day slaves. They work in the fields, in factories, brothels and private households — often without pay and usually with no realistic chance of escaping. The majority of them are sold or hired out by their own families.

According to an Indian government census from 2001, this country of over 1 billion people has 12.6 million minors between the ages of 5 and 14 who are working. The real number is undoubtedly significantly higher because many children are not officially registered at birth — and the owners of course do their best to keep the existence of child slaves a secret. Aid organizations estimate that three-quarters of all domestic servants in India are children, and 90 percent of those are girls. Although both child labor and child trafficking are illegal, police rarely intervene — and the courts seldom convict child traffickers and slaveholders.

'She Told Me I Would Be Well Treated'

Durga grew up in Calcutta. When she was seven, her father died, followed two years later by the death of her mother. Her grandmother took in Durga and her three elder sisters, but she couldn't manage to feed all four of them. One girl had to go, so she sold off the youngest. Via an intermediary, a family of total strangers paid 80 rupees for Durga — roughly the equivalent of €1 ($1.33).

Durga traveled alone by train the nearly 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) to Bangalore. She can't remember the journey, but she recalls her arrival. "The woman picked me up at the train station," she says. "I was afraid but she told me that I would be well treated."

From that day onwards, she cleaned the couple's apartment every day, cooked, did the laundry and the dishes. Durga was never paid, was never given time off and was never allowed to leave the building. The woman beat her often; the man hit her less often. Durga didn't try to defend herself. "Grandma told me I should always be nice," says Durga.

Today, Durga is 12 years old. Her weight has returned to normal, and she has large eyes and full lips. She wears her black hair tied in a knot behind her head. Her white teeth shine as she speaks, lighting up her soft face. Durga lives in Rainbow Home, a children's shelter run by the Catholic organization Bosco. Fifty-six girls live here in two empty rooms, with no chairs or tables. The children play, sleep and do their homework on the floor. They eat together in the hallway.

The home takes up one floor of a school building. The walls in the old building are painted blue and pink, and the caretakers teach the children to wash themselves on a regular basis, and not to immediately hit someone whenever there is a conflict. "It's hard work," says a nun named Anees. "For many children this is the first home that they have ever had," she points out, adding: "They all come from very disadvantaged families and have already experienced too much." Continue reading

Sources

• Spiegel Online
• Image: Akemi Gardens

"There are millions of children, mostly young girls, who are victims of this hidden form of exploitation that often leads to sexual abuse, poor treatment and discrimination," the Holy Father told a crowd of 60,000 gathered in St Peter's Square.

The comments came at the conclusion of his weekly General Audience and were made to coincide with the World Day Against Child Labour, an initiative of the international Labour Organisation that brings attention to the plight of exploited child labourers.

According to figures published today by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), an estimated 10.5 million children worldwide are working as domestic workers in people's homes.

Six and a half million of these child labourers are aged between five and 14 years old and more than 71 per cent are girls, it said.

"It is slavery!" the Pope declared.

Pope Francis concluded his appeal by calling on the international community to bring about more effective measures to combat child labour.

The 76 year old Pontiff also stated that all children have the right to play, study, pray and grow in their families.

"It is their right and our duty," the Pope stressed.

"A serene childhood allows children to look towards life and the future with confidence. Woe unto those who suffocate their joyous momentum of hope!" he said.

Sources

• The Telegraph
• Zenit
• Image: The Telegraph

Sme physicians in the city of Beed, India are engaging in the practice, according to India Today, which spoke with Varsha Deshpande of Lek Ladki Abhiyan, an NGO working against the practice. Maharashtra's Public Health Minister Suresh Shetty also admitted to the newspaper that he had heard of reports of the practice taking place. Continue reading

The clarification comes after the recent Vatican encouragement to bishops, for them to "be generous" in providing the Extraordinary Form of the Mass.

In answer to question whether female altar servers were permitted in the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, posed at the time of the new instruction to bishops, Vatican spokesman, Fr Federico Lombardi, said the matter was not specifically addressed in the instruction.

The Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei has clarified the Vatican's position, saying the instruction for the Tridentine Rite does not allow female altar servers because the norms, as applied in 1962 do not permit them.

Universae Ecclesiae states "the Moto Proprio Summorum Pontificum derogates from those provisions of law, connected with the Sacred Rites, promulgated from 1962 onwards and incompatible with the rubrics of the liturgical books in effect in 1962″.

Permission for female altar servers came with the Circular Letter of the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments of 1994. However, the rubrics of the 1962 Missal does not even allow for females on the sanctuary during Mass.

The letters was signed by by Mgr Guido Pozzo, Secretary of Ecclesia Dei

A spokesperson for the Latin Mass Society said the clarification was "significant" and that all bishops should practice in accordance with what has been stated in the letter.

Sources

• Catholic Herald
• CathNews