May 20, 2017 by IdealisticRebel

Our Girls Return to their Families

Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari applauds as he welcomes a group of Chibok girls, who were held captive for three years by the millitant group Boko Haram, in Abuja, Nigeria, May 7, 2017. Bayo Omoboriowo/Presidential Office/Handout via Reuters TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY ATTENTION EDITORS – FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY. NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVES. THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. – RTS15KIL

Freed Nigerian Schoolgirls Reunite With Their Families After 3 Years

Lekan Oyekanmi / AP

4:53 PM ET

(ABUJA, Nigeria) — The 82 Nigerian schoolgirls recently released after more than three years in Boko Haram captivity reunited with their families Saturday as anxious parents looked for signs of how deeply the extremists had changed their daughters’ lives.

Brightly dressed families rushed through the crowd in the capital, Abuja, and embraced. One small group sank to their knees, with a woman raising her hands as if praising in church. Some danced. Others were in tears.

“I am really happy today, I am Christmas and new year, I am very happy and I thank God,” said mother Godiya Joshua, whose daughter Esther was among those freed.

This month’s release was the largest liberation of hostages since 276 Chibok schoolgirls were abducted from their boarding school in 2014. Five commanders from the extremist group were exchanged for the girls’ freedom, and Nigeria’s government has said it would make further exchanges to bring the 113 remaining schoolgirls home.

“Our joy is never complete until we see the complete 113, because one Chibok girl matters to all Chibok people,” said a parent of one of the freed schoolgirls, Yahi Bwata.

Many of the girls, most of them Christians, were forced to marry extremists and have had children. Some have been radicalized and have refused to return. It is feared that some have been used in suicide bombings.

The mass abduction in April 2014 brought international attention to Boko Haram’s deadly insurgency in northern Nigeria, and it launched a global Bring Back Our Girls campaign that drew the backing of some celebrities, including former U.S. first lady Michelle Obama. Thousands have been kidnapped during the extremists’ eight-year insurgency, and more than 20,000 have been killed.

The release of the 82 schoolgirls this month came after an initial group of 21 girls was released in October. Nigeria’s government has acknowledged negotiating with Boko Haram for their release, with mediation help from the Swiss government and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The two groups of freed schoolgirls reunited earlier Saturday, Nigeria’s Channels TV reported, showing the young women laughing and embracing.

Since the latest release, many families in the remote Chibok community had been waiting for word on whether their daughters were among them. A government list of names circulated, and parents were asked to confirm the freed girls’ identities through photos.

Both groups of freed girls have been in government care in the capital as part of a nine-month reintegration program that President Muhammadu Buhari has said he will oversee personally. But human rights groups have criticized the government for keeping the young women so long in the capital, far from their homes.

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Associated Press writer Bashir Adigun in Abuja, Nigeria contributed.

I thought we could all use some good news.

There are still girls missing, and this isn’t over yet. For some of these girls, in many ways, it may never be totally over — any one who has survived abuse, or knows someone who did, will understand that — but they are home, and back where they belong.

My prayers got to them, their families and, especially, to the girls who are still missing, even the ones who have been brainwashed and have chosen to stay. I pray for them perhaps most of all.

Please help me in keeping a spotlight shined on Boko Haram’s crimes, until all Our Girls are home.

Namaste,

Barbara

May 25, 2016 by IdealisticRebel

The War On Women is Starting Earlier Now

The War on Women is being brought to us earlier and partly to produce more soldiers. The earlier girls are married off and impregnated, the sooner the next generation of soldiers will be ready to die for tyranny, oppression and Jihad. Shining the light, donating, writing letters to world leaders and world organizations is the only way to help girls and women.

Getting them an education will also help. Jihadists have proven that they fear women with an education.It may seem as if I am beating an old drum, but really I am not. These lives are worth our effort. The future will show us how right we are. Shine many lights, talk, write, donate and keep the pressure on for all the women and girls in the world. We can win. We won’t stop trying.

bjwordpressdivider

Brought to you by: UK Department for International Development

on May 25, 2016

Married at 3, divorced at 7: Two Ethiopian girls tell their stories

Jessica Lea / DFID

“I was really young on my wedding day. And I didn’t know we’d have sex that night. I thought my husband would wait for me to grow up, that he would wait for the right time.” ~ Selenat ~

For girls like Selenat, who got married when she was 13, child marriage marks the beginning of frequent and unprotected sex which often leads to an early and risky first pregnancy.

“At first we just slept. But the groomsmen kept on bugging my husband until he had to wake me up. That’s when it all happened. I didn’t really know what was going on because I was very small.

“The groomsmen and the entire family were so excited that I was a virgin that my pain, my screaming — that was the whole point of the marriage.” ~ Selenat ~

Image: Jessica Lea / DFID

In the last decade 58 million girls in developing countries — that’s 1 in 3 — have been married before they were 18.

Image: Jessica Lea / DFID

Ethiopia has one of the highest rates of early marriage in sub-Saharan Africa. In the Amhara region — where Selenat lives — the average age is 14.7 years.

Meet Bayush. She got married when she was 3.

Image: Jessica Lea / DFID

Bayush lives about an hour’s drive from Selenat’s village. She explains that girls need to stay in education “no matter what”. And she’s right. Research suggests that education may be the single most important factor in reducing early and forced marriage.

“I was very young when I got married. I don’t remember much. I remember people coming around with cattle and saying they were mine. But I didn’t really know what was going on.” ~ Bayush ~

Image: Jessica Lea / DFID

Bayush continued to live with her mum and dad after the wedding and her husband and new family visited for events. She was due to move in with her husband when she was about 8 or 9-years-old, but at the age of 7, Bayush asked to go to school.

It was this request that led to the end of her marriage. Bayush’s father refused to send her to school but her brother intervened — he offered to pay the school fees if Bayush could stay in the family home. Eventually, Bayush’s father agreed. Bayush’s relationship with her husband ended.

“Now my dad supports me, he’s on my side. He says that he would have ruined my life if he’d insisted I stay married.” ~ Bayush ~

Bayush also received support from the UK aid funded Finote Hiwot (which means “pathway to life”) programme.

“Finote Hiwot has helped me to stay in school with exercise books and pens and the different materials I need to complete my education.” ~Bayush~

Image: Jessica Lea / DFID

The programme — which is helping at least 37,500 adolescent girls, and indirectly many more — also runs community discussions about early marriage in Bayush’s village. These conversations ultimately bring behavioural change which provides the tipping point to end the practice.

Bayush often goes to the meetings and felt empowered to speak to her uncle, who was going to marry off her cousin.

“I told my uncle what I’ve learnt through Finote Hiwot. I explained how he’d become a better person if he sent his daughter to school. I also told him that his daughter is brilliant and he decided not to marry her off. I feel so proud of what I’ve done.

“Today I dream about completing my education and becoming a doctor to help people. I feel I have a responsibility to do that.” ~ Bayush ~

Image: Jessica Lea / Department for International Development

This story was originally published on Medium by the UK Department for International Development. Click here to find out more about how the Department for International Development is taking action to address early and forced marriage in a range of countries including Bangladesh, Nepal, Zambia, Uganda and Ethiopia.

February 10, 2015 by IdealisticRebel

New Facts of FGM

As Risk Of Female Genital Mutilation More Than Doubles In U.S, Lawmakers Take Action

By Lisa Anderson
NEW YORK, Feb 6 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – The number of women and girls in the United States at risk of female genital mutilation has more than doubled since 2000 to half a million, say demographic researchers who expect that figure to rise even further.

The report, released on International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) on Friday, said the main cause of the rapid growth was a doubling of immigration to the United States between 2000 and 2013 from African countries where the brutal tradition is prevalent.

“We put out these numbers so decisions can be made by policy makers in this country,” said Charlotte Feldman-Jacobs, an author of the report and director of the gender program at the nonprofit Population Reference Bureau (PRB).

“In order to know where these girls and women are and how many, this data is critical.”

FGM, which involves the partial or complete removal of the external genitalia, is considered a necessary pre-marriage ritual for girls in many countries, but it can cause lasting physical and psychological damage and even death.

The practice is most common in Africa and the Middle East, though most African countries where FGM is found have banned the practice.

PRB’s findings come at a time of heightened awareness and concern about FGM in the United States, which banned the practice in 1996 and passed a law in 2012 making it illegal to transport a girl out of the United States for the purpose of FGM.

On Thursday, U.S. Rep. Joe Crowley of New York and U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, both Democrats, introduced the Zero Tolerance for FGM Act of 2015, which would charge the federal government with drafting and implementing a national strategy to protect girls in the United States from FGM.

About 55 percent of the 506,795 women and girls in the United States at risk of FGM in 2013 were either born in Egypt, Ethiopia or Somalia, or born to parents from those countries, the researchers found.

In those countries, the vast majority of women and girls between the ages of 15 and 49 undergo FGM: 91 percent in Egypt, 74 percent in Ethiopia, and 98 percent in Somalia.

Other women and girls in the United States at risk of FGM were from or had familial ties to Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Kenya, Eritrea and Guinea.

“We applied country prevalence rates to the number of U.S. women and girls with ties to those countries to estimate risk,” said Mark Mather, a demographer at PRB who co-authored the report.

Overall, about 97 percent of U.S. women and girls at risk of FGM were from or had ties to African countries, while 3 percent were from Asia.

The state with the most women and girls at risk was California, followed by New York, Minnesota, Texas, Maryland, New Jersey, Virginia and Washington. Those eight states are home to about 60 percent of the total number of women and girls at risk in the country.

The women and girls at risk typically live in or around large cities, with about 40 percent of them living in the New York, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis-St. Paul, Los Angeles and Seattle metropolitan areas.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention plan to issue a report on FGM in the United States in coming weeks with conclusions similar to those from PRB.

“Having a better idea of the magnitude of FGM here will mean that we have a much stronger argument in terms of changing policy and allocating resources,” said Shelby Quast, policy director at Equality Now, an NGO dedicated to the protection and promotion of the human rights of women and girls globally.

More than 130 million girls and women in Africa and the Middle East have experienced some form of FGM, according to 2014 data from UNICEF.

(Reporting by Lisa Anderson, Editing by Alisa Tang.)

Some days, we all need some humor. I have over a foot of snow here. So you get humor!!!

This is so painful and create the possibility of infection. It is immoral to allow this to happen to women and children.

September 2, 2013 by IdealisticRebel

What Labor has Given us

Women need to receive equal pay for equal work

May 10, 2013 by IdealisticRebel

All Mother’s on this Planet Have a Day Even if They Aren’t Aware of it.

One Woman, One World, One Family, unending love.

Mother’s Day is huge here in America .This is nice. Flowers, candy, going out to dinner, a new plant for the garden. These make up an American Mother’s Day. I would like to remind you that Mothers are in every country and being a Mother is quite different than it is here.

Mothers in other countries don’t have a day or even an hour where they feel especially loved and appreciated. Mother’s in other countries face tragedies we never even can imagine. Many mothers continue to die in childbirth, many mothers don’t have milk to feed their babies. Many mothers can’t dress their babies up really cute because there are only rags to dress them in. I guarantee you that some mothers, on the American holiday, will be watching their babies die of starvation and diseases such as Malaria.

Most of the mothers around the world will be required to leave a girl baby by the side of the road because of misogyny and some are trying to heal the faces of daughters whose boyfriend threw acid in their face because they turned down a marriage proposal. The boy throws acid in her face so no one else will want her. This is classic power and control. Some mothers will be assisting a medicine woman to hold down her daughter so genital mutilation can occur just like what was done to her. In some countries, if a girl has not had this done, no one will marry her.

Why is all of this happening? It is because women and girls are second class citizens and have no rights and no power to protect them legally in the system. They are owned, used, punished, tormented and often killed.
My request is that from now through Sunday you would all pray for the mothers around the world. Pray for them to be protected, pray for healing and food, pray for an end to human traffakking. Please pray that some day millions of women around the world will understand that mother is a term of love, support and pride. Pray that a year will come when all women will be able to hold their heads up and walk with pride and dignity.