Passports to Progress

Kavita Ramdas, serving India, Nepal and Sri Lanka as the Ford Foundation’s New Delhi Representative, addresses the audience at the National Press Club during an ICRW event marking International Women’s Day that explored the causes and solutions to tackling the global epidemic of violence against young women and girls. Ramdas discusses the response to the brutal gang rape and subsequent death of Nirbhaya, a 23-year-old university student, in Delhi last December. Importantly, she also proposes ways to end violence against women in her country and beyond - which Ramdas says is the world’s greatest public health threat. 

Watch the video here>>

Preventing – and ultimately eliminating – violence against young women and girls worldwide requires a layered approach that simultaneously tackles everything from the root causes of violence to how it intersects with health complications such as maternal mortality, an International Center for Research on Women’s (ICRW) panel said on March 7.

The diverse group came together for ICRW’s first Passports to Progress event in honor of ICRW’s new Turning Point campaign, which aims to change the course adolescent girls’ lives globally. Some 300 gathered at Washington, D.C.’s National Press Club on the eve of International Women’s Day to take part in the wide-ranging discussion.

Moderated by MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, panelists were Michael Elliott, president and chief executive officer of One; Christy Turlington Burns, founder of Every Mother Counts; Stella Mukasa, director of ICRW research and programs on gender-based violence; and Ravi Verma, who directs ICRW’s Asia Regional Office in New Delhi, India. Kavita Ramdas, the Ford Foundation’s Delhi representative, shared her perspective in a pre-recorded video.

The gathering took place just days after 15-year-old Pakistani girls' education activist Malala Yousafzai - who survived a shooting by the Taliban - was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Then, the day after Passports to Progress, the U.S. State Department posthumously honored with its Women of Courage Award the young woman who was fatally raped last December in Delhi. The 23-year-old has become known as Nirbhaya, which means "fearless" in Hindi.

These and other recent incidents of violence that captured the global spotlight helped to frame the March 7 conversation. Verma stressed that the Delhi rape represents a common occurrence in India’s capital and emphasized the need to address not only such public reflections of violence against young women, but also those that play out quietly, such as child marriage. “This is a manifestation of violence that happens in terms of restricting [girls’] choices and denying their rights,” Verma said about the practice of early marriage.

Turlington-Burns agreed, stating that girls ages 15 to 19 are most at risk of dying from complications during childbirth. “Girls, because they’re not fully developed and they’re malnourished, are in an incredibly vulnerable position when they’re put in the position of being married and impregnated prematurely,” she said. “It’s an incredibly cruel way for them to be in the world.”

HIV also is “the leading killer” of young women of reproductive age in developing countries, Elliott said. Many face numerous obstacles, including violence, to accessing treatment and prevention services. “The nexus, the connections between HIV infections and violence against women are deep, significant and impenetrable,” he said. “Sexual violence and HIV infection reinforce each other.”

Panelists said that successfully preventing gender-based violence requires a multifaceted approach that targets the “cross-cutting” nature of violence – or rather, the way in which it intersects with other facets of women’s lives, such as their health, their livelihood and their relationships. Working with men’s organizations is critical. Evaluating whether prevention efforts are effective and replicable needs to be a priority. And, panelists said, creating national policies that protect and support women and that hold perpetrators accountable are key.

Mukasa suggested that the “next frontier” on this issue also requires beginning to treat women’s economic empowerment programs worldwide “as a strategy for protecting women against violence.” “We also recognize that women’s political influence and participation in political processes is very empowering,” Mukasa said.

However, it is essential that every type of violence-prevention program addresses the root causes of gender-based violence. Experts said the origins of violence start early, with how girls and boys are socialized at home and in school.

“How you value the other gender," Mukasa said, "begins there.”

The Indian state of Haryana, a short drive from the capital New Delhi, is known for its social conservatism, a declining female population due to sex selection, and more recently, for a number of brutal rapes reported by the national media.

As I would soon learn, life in rural India is full of contrasts and contradictions. The first family I met wanted to tell me about a local unmarried heroine who at 25 took home a gold medal after winning an international wrestling competition.

“If she’d gotten married, then her concentration would have been on the household and her husband, but she didn’t, and now she’s doing really well,” Susheela, a 37-year-old mother of four daughters, told me.

Life is hard for Susheela but she still smiles a lot. She even smiles when the conversation finally turns to more serious matters: what it was like for her to be married as an illiterate child and move in with a strange family, in a strange village, miles from home.

 “At 14, what had I seen? I never even went to school – parents didn’t send girls to school back then. I came here and my in-laws said ‘work in the fields,’ so I worked in the fields. Because I suffered, I didn’t want them to do the same. I thought it would be better if at least my daughters studied,” Susheela says.

Despite this recognition, – marrying their own teenage daughters off as soon as possible remains their priority due to deeply rooted cultural norms.

The International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) is currently evaluating an innovative government program that used cash incentives to encourage parents like Susheela to delay marrying their daughters until they turn 18 – with the added hope that attitudes about a girl’s inherent value would improve. One of Susheela’s daughters, 17-year-old Kirin, is among the first girls to take part in the effort, called Apni Beti Apna Dhan (ABAD) – “Our Daughter, Our Wealth.” ICRW’s findings will be released in late 2013. 

For now, Kirin and her older sister, Heena, 19, remain unmarried, and later this year, they will have both completed secondary school. Once Kirin gets her payment (worth $350-$500) the two girls will be immediately married in a joint wedding.

The girls have ambitions to continue on to college and start a career as teachers before settling down. Yet they seemed unsure if they would be able to lead a life outside of the home, despite their parents’ desire for them to study further.

“If our parents-in-law say we can’t continue our studies or get jobs, then we’ll have to listen to them and our dreams will only stay a dream,” Heena says.

Kirin, adds “I become hopeless and my heart breaks at the thought of not going to college. Boys have all the permission, they can go, but not girls, parents are scared. We want to go to Bhiwani town to study full time. But we can’t because of ‘the situation.’”

“The situation” refers to a spate of horrific rapes in the past several months in Haryana. In one of the most severe cases, eight men raped a 16-year-old girl. The powerful Khap panchayats which govern social affairs in Haryana, proposed a solution: lower the legal age of marriage for girls. Although they do not have the authority to do so, girls fear they will incur an additional cost for this escalation in violence against them.

“It is always the girl who is blamed. One does the bad deed, and the other always pays the price,” Heena says.

There is still a long road ahead to gender equity in rural India. But the fact that Heena and Kirin will both finish secondary school, and are still living at home, signals that a generational shift has occurred. At the very least, the quality of these educated sisters’ lives will undoubtedly far exceed that of their mother. Even if it’s unlikely they’ll ever become world class wrestlers.

Jennifer Abrahamson is ICRW’s Senior Director of Strategic Communications. A version of this story appears on the ONE Campaign web site. Not Her Mother's Daughter was Jennifer's last story about adolescent girls in India.

To learn more about how ICRW is working to “change the course for adolescent girls worldwide” visit the Turning Point campaign.