Girls marginalised because of their gender Senator tells “Lunch for Life”.

Pictured at the Plan Ireland "Lunch for Life" in Bleu Restaurant were (from left) guest speaker Senator Ivana Bacik, Patricia Callan, Director of the The Small Firms Association and Carol Ann Casey, MD of CA Consulting.

“Millions of girls are condemned to a lifetime of inequality and poverty, sometimes through geography and social class, sometimes through age; but very often simply because of their gender”. So said Senator Ivana Bacik in a speech to the second “Lunch for Life” organised by Plan Ireland.

These facts are starkly set out in the “Because I am a girl” reports produced by Plan. These show that worldwide, 62 million primary school-aged girls are not in education; that childhood malnutrition has led to stunted growth in an estimated 450 million women; and that more young girls aged 15-19 die from unsafe abortions and birth complications than from any other cause.

‘Because I am a girl’ warns that the Millennium Development Goals, due to be reviewed by the UN in the next two months, are unachievable without a global commitment to enforcing international laws that protect girls’ rights.

Quoting research produced in a series of Plan reports entitled “Because I am a Girl”, which examine the rights of girls throughout their childhood, adolescence and as young women, Senator Bacik said “… the fact that we need to assert that women's rights are human rights, and to explain why this is so, is itself a sign of the discrimination that women face”.

“This is a very appropriate theme for the week that’s in it, with International Women’s Day on Saturday” she remarked.

“There is a fundamental problem, however, with the definition of rights. It is simply not true that a universally accepted body of human rights exists. In fact, states differ over which rights they see as worthy of protection. A ‘cold war’ split exists within international human rights instruments; between first-generation ‘civil and political rights’, and second generation ‘economic and social rights’.

What does this distinction mean? Although there is some overlap in the two concepts of rights, they are identified with different political and economic ideologies. Civil and political rights, such as the right to free speech, typically guarantee ‘private’ individuals some degree of protection against the abuses of ‘public’ state power, but they do not impose any material obligations upon the state.

By contrast, economic and social rights are given priority. These are rights that are positively framed, as obligations upon the state. The right to housing is one example; the right to work, or to childcare, or protection against poverty, another. These positive rights, imposing duties upon the state to provide for its citizens, are elevated above the right to protection against other abuses of state power.