“Our world is grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic and also coming to terms with systematic racism and oppression that black communities and communities of color continue to experience in the United States and in other parts of the world,” said Sarah Craven, Director of the Washington, D.C. office at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) at a recent webinar launching UNFPA’s 2020 State of the World’s Population Report. This year’s report, titled Against My Will, covers three widespread practices that violate human rights, but are still accepted in many cultures—son preference, child marriage, and female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C).

According to the report, 4 million girls this year will undergo FGM/C, or the process that removes external genital tissue from a girl’s body. Some 33,000 child marriages occur every day globally, according to UNFPA estimates. And due to the global preference for sons over daughters, more than 140 million girls are considered missing today due to infanticide, kidnapping, trafficking, or other forms of violence against female infants and young girls. In societies where men outnumber women, said Craven, women are at risk of experiencing rape, coerced sex, sexual exploitation, trafficking, and child marriage. These practices are all rooted in gender inequality and a desire to control women’s bodies and lives, she said.

The pandemic has really laid bare all of the vulnerabilities that we have as a society, not just here in our nation, but around the world, said Congresswoman Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA). COVID-19 will disproportionately impact minorities and exacerbates gender-based violence worldwide, she said. “COVID-19 threatens to thwart progress in ending the harmful practices that this report outlines,” said Craven. “And the trauma and harm that women and girls experience is rooted [in] and amplified by the same oppression and discrimination that tears away at the core of our society.” 

Political Will Needed to Outlaw Practices

Political will is needed to create laws to outlaw or create consequences for these practices. In the United States, laws attempt to ban child marriage, said Jeanne Smoot, Senior Counsel for Policy and Strategy at Tahirih Justice Center. Advocates like Tahirih Justice Center have advocated for state laws to set 18 as the minimum age for marriage. Currently, only four states set the minimum age at 18 with no exceptions. In other states, exceptions like parental consent, a patriarchal norm, allows forced marriages to persist. However, slow and incremental progress is still an effective way to mitigate immediate harms and change systems, said Smoot.

Marriage before age 18 has devastating consequences and in the United States it is associated with higher high school and college dropout rates, as well as higher poverty rates. Teen mothers who marry and later divorce are twice as likely to face poverty than others their age, said Smoot. In the United States in 2018, 200,000 girls younger than 18 were married, often to adult men who were sometimes decades older.

It’s clear that more than laws need to change. Changes to culture and social norms are often the only way to make systemic and generational change, said Dr. Kakenya Ntaiya, Founder and President of Kakenya’s Dream. In Kenya, despite being outlawed for 10 years, the prevalence of FGM/C  is 21 percent. In some communities, the prevalence is as high as 97 percent. While many interventions to end FGM/C focus on changing perspectives among youth, the practice is common. Parents and community leaders must be involved in educating others on the harm caused by FGM/C in order to stop the practice. The commitment to end FGM/C needs to be a generational investment, said Ntaiya.

In the last few years, there has been a growing phenomenon of medicalization of FGM/C, where doctors, nurses, and midwives perform the procedure instead of community members, said Sarah Hillware, Deputy Director of Women in Global Health. While some see this as harm reduction, since clean tools and anesthetics are used during the procedure, medicalization still perpetuates social norms that allow FGM/C to continue, said Hillware.

Interventions need to promote advocacy to empower nurses and midwives to refuse to perform the procedure and include them in the decision-making process, said Hillware. In some cases where medicalization is widely accepted, laws need to impose stronger consequences for medical professionals performing FGM/C, like revoking licenses to practice, said Ntaiya.

Undoing Progress

COVID-19 is undoing years of progress on gender-based violence, especially on the three practices highlighted in the report. Due to the pandemic, experts project that another 2 million girls will be added to the number of girls who will be cut this year, resulting in a total of 6 million girls who suffer from FGM/C. Safe spaces in communities like schools and clubs have been shut down to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and realistically, when these schools open again, many girls might not return to school. The pandemic is increasing the economic burden on families that now have all their children at home during the day. This increases the risk of families marrying their daughters to reduce the burden at home, said Ntaiya.

Global Investment in Gender Equality 

Gender equality is often seen as a technical siloed issue, but it is actually a multisectoral issue, said Hillware. Globally, greater investment in women as leaders is needed. Funding organizations led by women and focused on gender equality and empowering women and girls to be their own best advocate would help, she said. While we often address girls and women as two separate constituencies, they actually need to be treated as related groups. You cannot address women’s rights without girls’ rights, and vice versa, said Hillware.

The good news, she said, is that girls and women increasingly want to end these practices. Girls and young women are 50 percent more likely to oppose child marriage, FGM/C, and son preference than older women. Persistence is the key to this change, said Ntaiya.

So is involving men and boys, especially at the community level. Kakenya’s Dream teaches both boys and girls the harmful impacts of FGM/C and reduces the taboo around health issues like menstruation. Boys are then able to educate their peers and advocate for girls in their community. This work has paid off, said Ntaiya, as literally 10 years ago, no one would think that girls belong in school in Kenya where she grew up. Because of these interventions with boys and men, social norms, and therefore patriarchal systems, are able to change.

“We all know that when women are healthy, that their families are more likely to be healthy, that there is more likely to be peace in their communities, peace in their nations, in their countries, and peace in the world,” said Rep. Houlahan.