By Kathryn Maureen Ryan
Impunity Watch, Managing Editor

UNITED NATIONS HEADQUARTERS, United Nations – The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has reported that young girls in at least 70 countries are facing increased threats of violence and even targeting killings simply for trying to exercise the basic human right of education by going to school. “Attacks against girls accessing education persist and, alarmingly, appear in some countries to be occurring with increasing regularity,” the OHCHR said in a background paper on attacks against girls seeking to access education, which was published on Tuesday. The educational rights of girls and women are often targeted due to the fact that they represent a challenge to existing gender and age-based systems of oppression.” The report said, “According to UN sources, more than 3,600 separate attacks against educational institutions, teachers and students were recorded in 2012 alone.” The background paper will be presented to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) to contribute to the development of the Committee’s general recommendation on access to education.

The report shows that attacks on girls seeking education take several forms and are not always explicitly motivated by a desire to keep girls from obtaining an education. The violence experienced by girls and women effects all areas of their public and private lives, the report notes. “Attacks involving sexual violence against teachers and girls in educational facilities or during the journey to or from them have been reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, El Salvador, Haiti, Indonesia, Iraq, Mali, Myanmar, the Philippines and Syria,” the paper notes.

The report cites several disturbing examples of attacks against girls seeking access to education, highlighting the fragility of achievements in increasing global access to education for all genders. Among the examples cited in the report are the murder in December 2014 of more than 100 young children in a Pakistani Taliban attack at an school in Peshawar attended by the children of army personnel, the abduction of nearly 300 schoolgirls in April 2014 by the Boko Haram movement in northeast Nigeria and the 2012 shooting by members of the Taliban in Pakistan of education activist Malala Yousafzai who recently became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The report also cites several disturbing incidents of poisoning and acid attacks against schoolgirls in Afghanistan between 2012 and 2014, the reported forced removal of young girls from schools in Somalia who are forced to become ‘wives’ of Al-Shabaab fighters in 2010, as well as the abduction and rape of girls at a Christian school in India in July 2013.

“Attacks on girls’ education have a ripple effect – not only do they impact on the lives of the girls and communities who are directly concerned, they also send a signal to other parents and guardians that schools are not safe places for girl,” the report states. However, if more parents chose to keep their young girls out of school in response to this growing trend young girls could be more vulnerable to other dangers associated with lack of access to education including the increased likelihood that they will face domestic violence during their lifetime or that they may become the victims of human trafficking and sexual and labor exploitation.

For more information please see:

ABC News – Brutal Attacks on Schoolgirls on the Rise: UN – 9 February 2015

Al Jazeera – UN Says Global Violence against Schoolgirls Rising – 9 February 2015

The New York Times – Schoolgirl Are Facing More Threat, U.N. – 9 February 2015

United Nations News Centre – UN Rights Report Points to ‘Increasing Regularity’ Of Attacks on Girls Seeking Education – 9 February 2015

Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights – Background Paper on Attacks against Girls Seeking To Access Education – 9 February 2015