The 13th birthday is a red letter day for most teenagers. It was the same for Sandhya Biswas. On this day, she landed her first job and her first new dress in 13 years. Since then Sandhya has been a maid with half a dozen households "" underpaid and overworked. Bad enough this, but her worst nightmare is warding off unwanted attention from the drivers and gardeners.
For Saana, the entry into her teens was written literally in platinum. The grand finale to her birthday celebrations "" an elegant platinum ring set with diamonds from her uncle. Saana's friends envy her good fortune, but for her, the ring symbolises her deep dark secret "" an eternal bondage to her uncle's repeated sexual abuse.
These dark tales are only the tip of the iceberg. Fortunately, enough NGOs have come to realise that the adolescent girl, is ignored, invisible and thereby marginalised. To redress the situation, for the first time, a two-day national conference on Expanding Partnerships for Adolescent Girls opens in the Capital today.
The conference is being organised by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), in collaboration with the US-based Centre for Development and Population Activities (CEDPA) and Delhi-based NGO, Prerana.
The two-day conference hopes to make people more alive to the burning problems faced by the adolescent girl. It is roping in the active participation of senior government officials, the corporate sector, NGOs and experts from the field of development.
NGOs championing the cause argue that clubbing teenaged girls with other focus groups like women and children has resulted in an insensitivity to their problems. Redressal of problems related to this special needs group become essential because it is through them that the foundations for a new generation are laid.
The issues of lack of access to education and information to women, repeated and early pregnancies and the health risks attached are fairly well-documented. And the social costs to the community on account of the marginalisation of women is also now fairly well acknowledged. But what is entirely new at this juncture is the recognition of the teenaged girl as a special needs group with the focus entirely on her specific problems.
Nobody is aware of the adolescent girl, primarily because she has never been identified as an entity, whose unique problems have to be addressed and redressed for the larger good, states Shalini Prasad, media coordinator for the conference.
Prasad argues that much has been done for the girl child after the UN declaration adopting 1990 as the Year of the Girl Child. It was a natural progression that SAARC picked up the idea and declared 1991-2000 as the Decade of the Girl Child. The net result is that today this group is part of the planning process. A National Plan of Action for the Girl Child for 1991-2000 is now in place.
Prasad feels that the unique problems of the teenage girl stand highlighted by the fact that there is a dearth of reliable statistics.
The most reliable of these statistics is of course UN documentation, but even these are sketchy. UN statistics, for instance, list women and children as special needs groups, while Unicef publications club the adolescent girl with the under-20s.
By these measures, adolescents represent one-third of the global populations, 84 per cent of whom live in developing countries. Coming to country specific data, the UN's India Country report places the population of girls under the age of 19 years to be one-fourth the country's population of 846 million. Despite their numbers, and the fact that girls are biologically stronger, survival statistics for the country indicate that on an average 3,00,000 girls more die annually.
Such broad statistics are useful only upto a point since issues relating to the adolescent girl vary from country to country.
In India, for instance, the concept of adolescence, as defined in the West, is almost entirely foreign. On the contrary, the issue here primarily revolves around the progression of a girl child directly into womanhood, without having had the time to mentally or physically adjust to the demands made by such quick maturity on her mind and body.
As a result, of the average 15 million girls born in India annually, 25 per cent do not live to see their 15th birthday, while 13 per cent die before the age of 24. This is primarily due to complications arising from pregnancies.
Adolescent girls need, but do not have access to necessary health and nutrition services as they mature. Counselling and access to health information and services for adolescent girls are terribly inadequate.
Adolescent girls are both biologically and physiologically more vulnerable than boys to sexual abuse, violence and prostitution. A study by Veeraraghavan (1987) indicates that most rape victims fall in the 12-16 years category and the rapists are mostly neighbours.
Prasad points out that the aim of the conference is to address such issues. As a first step, the conference hopes to sensitise the participants to viewing the adolescent girl as a focus group.
Next, the conference hopes to get some kind of commitment from the participants, particularly the government. As Prasad points out, the NGO effort would be wasted without governmental support. The lot of the girl child is improving only because she has been identified and accepted as a part of the planning process. Only the government has the wherewithal to do the same for the adolescent girl, she says.
If NGOs, the government, the corporate sector and the donor communities can get their act together, the teenage Indian girl could look forward to something she hasn't had before "" a future.
