NGO seeks to raise awareness about violence against girls in Latin America

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The NGO Plan International launched this Monday the campaign “We believe in girls”, to raise awareness about violence, early pregnancy, and forced marriages and unions. Three main problems suffered by minors in Latin America and the Caribbean.

“We want to promote a local and regional movement to raise awareness and make visible the life stories of what is happening to girls in our region and that they can tell their stories through their voices,” said Debora Cobar, regional director of Plan International Americas.

The campaign is present in 11 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean: Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, and the Dominican Republic, where messages of testimonies of minors are launched to learn about the reality they live.

“We want a girls’ movement to be transformed in favor of girls, but also to show their potential,” she added.

THREE HISTORICAL PROBLEMS EXACERBATED BY COVID-19

“In Latin America, we have several situations that affect girls and adolescents, but we want to focus on three specific areas, which seem very serious to us and have worsened during the pandemic: violence, early pregnancy, and forced unions,” added Cobar.

The idea is “to show what is happening: violence has increased, especially during the covid period, and the factors used to protect them have now disappeared, such as school.

In Guatemala, for example, we have observed that 12 girls, between 10 and 14 years old, give birth every day; this is extremely serious”.

And “as for forced marriages or unions, even though laws have been passed to eradicate child marriage, forced unions continue to take place”.

Latin America and the Caribbean, the region considered to be the most unequal in the world, has “dire” figures, according to Cobar: 15% of all registered early pregnancies occur in children under 15 years of age, figures that have hardly been reduced in recent years, according to data provided by the NGO.

Unlike other regions of the world, where progress has been made in reducing forced child marriages and unions, in Latin America and the Caribbean, this situation “has not changed in 25 years”, which is why the campaign aims to “raise the issue, make it more visible and get allies”.

Plan International emphasizes that most sexual abuse in the region occurs in minors and is usually committed by aggressors in their immediate environment: 75% of the cases in El Salvador occur before the age of 17, 74.72% in Colombia occur before the age of 14, and 64% of the cases in Ecuador are before the age of 18.

Pregnancies in children under 14 are the consequence of sexual abuse, leaving “girl mothers”: in Peru, for example, in 2018, every day six girls between 12 and 14 gave birth; and Guatemala, during 2020, the situation was 12 girls between 10 and 14 every day.

One in four girls and adolescents in Latin America and the Caribbean marries for the first time or has an early union before the age of 18, while eight in 10 do so before 20.

“We believe that the testimonies collected by the campaign are compelling,” said Plan’s director.