Empower our girl children with education, equality

While this can be heralded as good news, we need to consider the quality of education and empowerment provided in our schools. For instance, child marriages are happening even today. When girls drop out of school after Class 10, parents are afraid that they will elope or marry someone outside their caste. So, the girls are pushed to get married, which makes them vulnerable. Early pregnancy can lead to health issues such as anaemia. In addition to empowerment, we must make our public spaces safer for girl children. A decade ago, you didn’t see many girls visiting hotels or parks or the beach on their own. Today, that is not the case. 

While we have empowered our girls, we have failed to create safe public spaces. In many of our public spaces, a girl’s rights are violated. We need to make our spaces safe to ensure that girls enjoy the same rights as boys. Whenever there is an instance of abuse, fingers are pointed at the girl – the blame is laid on the clothes she was wearing or that she was outs at a late hour. This victimisation should stop. Otherwise, we are failing terribly as a society. There is a different rule for boys and girls – in schools and colleges, girls have a dress code. Girls are expected to be home by 7 pm while boys have no such curfew. Each time you tell your daughter to be home early, you are sending a wrong signal to your son that girls must behave in a specific manner. If you are enforcing such rules, you are subscribing to a patriarchal mindset. Empowerment should start from home. Today, our movies show girls as ‘easy’ targets. 

Most of our films give out a wrong message – that a boy can make a girl fall in love, through fraudulent means or dangerous practices such as stalking or eve teasing. Children – both girls and boys – should be taught at an early age, what is acceptable and what isn’t.  At the senior secondary level, girls are outnumbering the boys – right from enrolment in examinations to pass percentages. But the question we should be asking is this: Has the education empowered our girl children? We need to revisit that. Education should go beyond literacy and empower our children.