Humanitaire crises treffen veel vaker vrouwen en kinderen (en)
17/10/2013 - Humanitarian crises are not gender or age neutral. Women and children are 14 times more likely than men to die in an emergency, and boys generally received preferential treatment over girls in rescue efforts: disasters further increase the chances of adolescent females being forced into early marriage and transactional sex among other forms of violence, abuse and exploitation. They're also the ones usually pulled out of schools, and often miss out food distributions as well.
Following the International Day of the Girl Child, globally observed on 11 October, the NGO Plan International released its yearly report 'Because I am a Girl', focused on teenagers in emergencies. The European Commission's department for Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection (ECHO) participated in a round-table discussion on the main findings of the research, with its Director-General Claus Sørensen emphasizing that not addressing girls' needs in the aftermath of crises leads to stigma and other long term negative consequences for entire communities.
At the roundtable hosted by MEP Michele Striffler i, DG Sørensen further highlighted ECHO's commitment to preventing those situations by fostering gender and age sensitive relief assistance on the ground. Ensuring that humanitarian interventions tackle the specificities of women, men, boys and girls is part of ECHO's commitment to increasing the quality of aid.
Its recently adopted policy on 'Different Needs, Adapted Assistance' and upcoming Gender-Age Marker for our partner organisations' initiatives will strengthen this approach, making sure that calamities do not permanently deprive adolescent girls of having a better future than the past just because their particular vulnerabilities and capacities aren't taken into account.
"In many parts of the world being born a girl is a sentence, even in this day and age", and emergencies cast "a double-edged danger" upon adolescents. Nevertheless, as emphasised by the EU Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva i, women of all ages are also capable "of extraordinary resilience."
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