Violence and gender discrimination starts from childhood, as evidenced by the fact that girls suffer more dropouts from school, domestic violence and lack of access to various services, which makes it urgent that public policies be designed to meet the needs of this sector.
So said Juan Martin Perez, president of the Network for the Rights of Children in Mexico (Redim), who presented an analysis of the situation of female minors in the country, with regard to the declaration of October 11 as International Day of the Girl, an event to be celebrated beginning this year.
"In the Convention on the Rights of the Child, signed in 1989, there is no gender perspective, nor are the particular needs of girls considered. Violence and discrimination begins with them," he lamented.Proof of this is that, according to the Mexico National Institute of Statistics and Geography, one in three girls between birth and 17 do not have access to social security [health] services, nine out of 10 teenage mothers drop out of school, and two thirds of the so-called 'ninis' [youth who are neither in school nor working] are women.
He stressed that in 2010 the number of children dying from homicide reached 329, the highest figure in the past 10 years, and in 2011 there were 693 girls imprisoned for federal crimes, more than double the previous year. Of that population, 34.6 percent were for possession and consumption of drugs, and 19.2 percent for violating the Federal Firearms and Explosives law.
Therefore, the specialist on children's rights said, it is urgent to design comprehensive public policies that address the specific needs of girls, because now the Mexican state spends less than one percent of its gross domestic product to protect this vulnerable population, comprising nearly 20 million people.
García Pérez said that Redim and other civil society groups have made their demands to the transition team of President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto, and emphasized that a pending task of government is to create a formal system of information on violence against minors.
Alicia Vargas, president of Redim, meanwhile stressed that discrimination against girls is even more serious in the case of indigenous peoples, because besides suffering marginalization as women, they also suffer because of their ethnicity.
For this reason, 46 percent of children of native people do not go to school, 60 percent have some degree of malnutrition, 33 percent are abused in their family, and one in six are sexually assaulted.
"We must reflect on girls' access to their rights, so they can make better decisions as adults," she said.Spanish original