Paragraphs 71 and 72 – Beijing Platform for Action, Chapter IV. B. Education and Training of Women
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/06
71. Discrimination in girls’ access to education persists in many areas, owing to customary attitudes, early marriages and pregnancies, inadequate and gender-biased teaching and educational materials, sexual harassment and lack of adequate and physically and otherwise accessible schooling facilities. Girls undertake heavy domestic work at a very early age. Girls and young women are expected to manage both educational and domestic responsibilities, often resulting in poor scholastic performance and early drop-out from the educational system. This has long-lasting consequences for all aspects of women’s lives.
72. Creation of an educational and social environment, in which women and men, girls and boys, are treated equally and encouraged to achieve their full potential, respecting their freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief, and where educational resources promote non-stereotyped images of women and men, would be effective in the elimination of the causes of discrimination against women and inequalities between women and men.
Beijing Declaration (1995)
These sections of the Beijing Declaration, as is important to reiterate, deal with education through the lens of gender and discrimination in education. But what does “discrimination in education” mean if gender is brought into the equation? The basic idea: the empiricism of the query. It should have an evidentiary basis.
We should be able to discover the fact of the matter. Is there a statistically significant disparity in educational attainment and access when comparing a binary metric – boys and girls, or men and women. When asking this question, the robust answer can come via region or internationally.
The question has been asked. The data has come in, with several answers provided as to the potential reason for it. Looking at the information, there is a definite disparity, smaller than 1995 but extant, in the level of education for girls compared to boys – even in simple access.
The reduction in opportunities for girls reduces their life prospects for the long-term with remedial hope for recovery. It is simply a difficult circumstance. Some of the reasons for the disparity include “customary attitudes, early marriages and pregnancies, inadequate and gender-biased teaching and educational materials,” even to the terribly tragic and criminal behavior of sexual harassment.
This has a long-term impact on the ability of the girls to cope with the world as they will, in many cases, likely be dealing with the trauma and reliving of said trauma throughout much of their adult life, especially as there may be inadequate psychological-counselling care or mental health services for their plight.
Then there is the other problem, discussed in some of the human rights social interest group calls recently, of physical violence against women, which, in fact, is not solely by men to women but, based on the available data, disproportionately by men to women. Now, this exists alongside the problem of even having access to and reaching school.
They will not have access to the proper facilities for education. When they return home, they will be the ones to disproportionately be dealing with the “heavy domestic work at a very early age.” Thus, this happens in all spheres of their life right from the ground up, speaking of age, of course.
As bluntly stated, “This has long-lasting consequences for all aspects of women’s lives.” Paragraph 72 deals with a similar context in urging for equality, quite directly in fact, as in paragraph 71 but from a more assertive and proactive tone. It is an interesting insight for this section to merge the educational and social environment.
It is an education, as a right as the backdrop. But it is a social environment with real live bodies, students and educators, working in a shared interpersonal setting. In this area, it stipulates the importance of boys and girls, and women and men, being treated with equality, which is simply reiterating respect and dignity for all in the call for educational access for all.
The achievement of full “freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief” is, in fact, quite a call and a rare one too. It requires much from people. The necessity in the implementation of the right to education, which is a universal rights call; then, however, we have the particular call for more proportionate access for girls and women.
The latter call will be the one to elevate not only the girls and women in dignity with the society, and in self-respect, but also the society itself. More education adult women, which assumes education of them as girls earlier, means more advanced job opportunities to raise the floor of the country.
The finalized nuance is in the call for the promotion of non-stereotype representations of women and men to prevent early discrimination against women and for men – and, in some cases, vice versa. Indeed, this may not be an afterthought or trivial in any way. Media matters; and it matters for self-image and self-efficacy too.
–One can find similar statements in other documents, conventions, declarations and so on, with the subsequent statements of equality or women’s rights:
- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the Preamble, Article 16, and Article 25(2).
- Convention Against Discrimination in Education (1960) in Article 1.
- The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) in Article 3, Article 7, and Article 13.
- International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966).
- Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979).
- Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984).
- The Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (1993).
- Beijing Declaration(1995).
- United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000).
- Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children (2000).
- The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa or the “Maputo Protocol” (2003).
- Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence or the Istanbul Convention (2011) Article 38 and Article 39.
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