The Fifty-first Session of the Commission on the Status of Women
26/02/2007, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Global
When (begins) : 2007-02-26 19:00 (Ottawa) DST 2007-03-09 19:00 (Ottawa) DST -
The fifty-first session of the Commission on the Status of Women will take place from February 26 to March 9 2007 in New York. There, the Commission will consider “The elimination of all forms of discrimination and violence against the girl child” as its priority theme.
The United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) is dedicated exclusively to gender equality and advancement of women. The Commission was established by the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) resolution 11(II) of 21 June 1946 with the aim to prepare recommendations and reports to the Council on promoting women's rights in political, economic, civil, social and educational fields. The Commission also makes recommendations to the Council on urgent problems requiring immediate attention in the field of women's rights.
It is the principal global policy-making body. Every year, representatives of Member States gather at United Nations Headquarters in New York to evaluate progress on gender equality, identify challenges, set global standards and formulate concrete policies to promote gender equality and advancement of women worldwide. The next session of the Commission (fifty-first session) will take place from 26 February to 9 March 2007. The theme of the fifty-first session of the CSW is “the elimination of all forms of discrimination and violence against the girl child.”
IDRC's Women’s Rights and Citizenship program (WRC) – in collaboration with two other IDRC programs, Peace, Conflict, and Development (PCD) and Governance, Equity, and Health (GEH) – is hosting two panels at the upcoming CSW.
- The first panel will address the issue of the missing girl child in India and China.
Panellists will speak on factors contributing to the ‘masculinization’ of the sex ratio in selected districts in five Indian states. During the past two decades, millions of girls have gone “missing” in India. This phenomenon of “missing girls” has generated enormous concern in recent years – both locally and internationally. Contrary to the tendency to lay the blame for the millions of “missing girl children” at the door of technological misuse alone, the IDRC supported study shows that many factors are at work, including significantly gendered child mortality rates in some areas. Neglect of girls, whether passive or willed, continues to be a “killer”. At the same time, for all those who have been emphasizing the feminisation of poverty, the recent patterns in the adverse sex ratio are deeply disorienting, since the more prosperous regions of north-western India, as well as urban metropolitan locations, have the worst sex ratios and the steepest declines. A potential crisis in the very paradigm of development and in concepts of women’s empowerment is therefore in the making, claims the study.
The panel presentation will also examine the ways in which birth planning policies and other factors shape the reported sex ratio in China, as well as changing attitudes towards daughters and their adoption by Chinese families in the face of female infant abandonment and population policy.
- The second panel will address the issue of the impact of violent conflict on the girl child.
Unlike wars of previous centuries, conflict is now fought in communities, in the street, homes and workplaces of ordinary citizens. Increasingly it is acknowledged that in these contexts, women, girls, boys and men experience conflict differently. Although United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325) on women, peace and security, identifies the need to recognize the unique experiences of women and girls in conflict, girls and adolescent girls are often overlooked within conflict contexts and in post-conflict reconstruction policy and programming.
Girls and adolescent girls experience several forms of violence in conflict including forced displacement, early marriage and forced recruitment into armed groups, HIV/AIDS, trafficking, forced impregnation and rape. Through multiple identities and roles (head of household, combatant, peace activist, mother) girls and adolescent girls in conflict and post-conflict contexts have demonstrated resiliency, coping and survival skills.
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