Girls at U.N. Meeting Urge Global Action (U.N. Commission on the Status of Women)

[Omaha Steve]

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20070303/D8NKRDLO0.html

Girls at U.N. Meeting Urge Global Action
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Mar 3, 12:55 PM (ET)

By EDITH M. LEDERER

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - A 16-year-old Nepalese girl burst into tears describing her work in a match factory to help support her mother. A Jordanian teen spoke out about violence against girls in rural areas. A former child soldier from Congo cried when she recalled her suffering as a sex slave.

The three are among more than 200 young people attending a high-level meeting of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, which this year is focusing on discrimination and violence against girls. They spoke at a panel and a news conference about issues that concern them, ranging from rape, trafficking and prostitution to education, child labor and AIDS.

"The most important message is that governments should ensure that every working child gets a free education," said Sunita Tamang, lamenting that in her community in Nepal "people think that if you educate a girl child, it will only embarrass you."


In this photo released by the United Nations, CBS News anchor Katie Couric, left, addresses the audience at the United Nations in New York during an event entitled "Girls Speak Out," Friday, March 2, 2007. Couric moderated the event where six girls from around the world, including a former child soldier from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an HIV-positive teen from Zambia who had been raped at age 9, and a child-laborer from Nepal, shared the experiences that made them activists. (AP Photo/The United Nations, Evan Schneider)


There was a time, she said tearfully, when she couldn't go to school because she had to work to help her mother, a single parent. But now, through a program supported by the U.N. children's agency, UNICEF, she attends classes in the morning and works in the factory making boxes for matches in the afternoon.

FULL story at link.

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1. if you want to improve the world --

improve the lives of girls and women.

[colorado_ufo]

2. I read this with tears.

How much suffering goes on in so many people's daily lives - most particularly girls' and women's - that goes unheard, unaddressed, and unabated, until and even after they die? It is incomprehensible. Most sad of all, the vast and overwhelming majority of it is completely unnecessary.

Will humanity ever come to its senses? We can only hope that evolution will speed up a bit.

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3. Good work by UNICEF - Katie Couric as moderator sounds rather odd, btw

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