Girls are not sex tools- Educationist
Mr Stephen Boadu Appiah, Upper Manya Krobo District Director of Education, has expressed worry about indecent assault on young girls by adults, and warned the culprits that girls are not sex tools.
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“Girls are not beast of burden, they are not ordinary things, they are our mothers, sisters, daughters and our very survival,” he stressed.
Mr Boadu noted that the survival of the human race depends on the well-being of the girl-child.
He appealed to the government to initiate policies and programmes backed by the right legislation and punishment to remove all forms of discrimination, abuses and neglect of the girl-child.
Mr Appiah said this in a speech read on his behalf at the second celebration of the International Day of the Girl-Child at Akateng in the Upper Manya Krobo District.
The occasion coincided with the annual launch of Plan International’s “Because I Am a Girl” (BIAAG) campaign on the theme: “In Double Jeopardy: Adolescent Girls and Disasters.”
He noted that the girl-child who is rather “the mother of a nation” is neglected, abused and discriminated against.
“All forms of despicable inhuman things are done to our girls, forgetting that, girls hold the key to the human race; and therefore improvement and longevity of the human race.”
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Mr Kofi Adade Debrah, Eastern Regional Programme Unit Manager of Plan Ghana, said the BIAAG campaign is a worldwide initiative to eliminate gender inequality, promote girl’s rights and help lift girls and their associates out of poverty.
He entreated the adolescent and school-going girls to exercise restraint and acquire the necessary life-skills to put them at the right economic platform in order to forestall their future poverty, before they think of pregnancy.
Mr Debrah appealed to the government to put in the right policies to ensure that the adolescent girl is positioned on the right path to take her appropriate position in the near future.
“The issue of early marriage, girls marrying before being 18 years, with the Eastern Region recording 27.2 per cent is promoting population boom without the commensurate economic resource base and is also part of putting girls in the area of maternal mortality,” he said.
He therefore suggested to the government to raise the consent age for sex from 16 to 18 years to minimise the occurrence of teenage pregnancies.
Mr Debrah said the development of the girl-child should be of a national concern as healthy and well educated girls are national assets to ensure qualitative quota in national development.
Source: GNA/Ghana