Girls

Girls and girlhood
Time we were noticed. Girls don't exist, according to the experts. Can we remove our gender blinkers, asks Maggie Black?

Eva, the incredible invisible girl!
A cartoon by Kate Charlesworth.

The Unwanted Sex
In India, preference for sons leads to gross injustice. Sakuntala Narasimhan reports.

Maids of All Work
Hidden away, the most exploited child workers of all are domestics, according to Judith Ennew.

A passage out of hell
Trying to get off the streets of Brazil. By Anthony Swift.

Being a girl
At two-and-a-half in Germany; at six as a Goddess in Nepal; and at 1O, as a small British bully.

Going to grannie's
African women are speaking out against the mutilation of female genitalia, as Janie Hampton discovers

GIRLS-THE FACTS
Life chances, health, schooling, work - what do we know about girls?

Lolita's not to blame
The damage of sexual abuse can easily last a lifetime - if the girl thinks she's to blame. Roxanne Snider explain.

Chalking up victories
Schooling is the gateway to better female life chances. Reports from Shahidul Alam and Raana Haider in Bangladesh, Ajoa Yeboah-Afari in Ghana, and Sara Cameron in Barbados.

Simply - the fiction, the fantasy
Who are their role-models and how are girls around the world portrayed?

Action
Doing more and learning more about the situation of girls

'Thank heaven for leettle girls,' lilted Maurice Chevalier in a popular film of my girlhood. You won't find that kind of sentiment here. So changed are attitudes since those antediluvian times that any film today with an ageing gallant making suggestive comments about little girls would show him as a villain.

When I started this issue, its working title was 'the girl child', and all the material which had been collected both by me and by NI (I am a guest) was about girls in the South. This was not surprising, because it was as a gender and development issue that the topic had been selected.

But as I began to talk to people - researchers, equal opportunities officers, teachers, women activists and academics - here in the North, I found that the phrase 'the girl child' elicited incomprehension. It began to sound silly to me, too. Why 'the girl child'? Why not simply 'girls'? It seemed that, in the way that sometimes happens surreptitiously, 'the girl child' carried restrictive connotations. We were in danger of doing something I much dislike, viewing the South through a different lens from the one we train on our own society. It wasn't as if no-one was looking at girlhood in the North - far from it. And while many forms of girl discrimination do have cultural and poverty connections, others don't. Look for son preference and you'll find it anywhere on earth.

So I dropped 'the girl child' and the subject of the magazine became 'girls'. But this produced its own problems. It could easily sound frivolous. And when I came across male researchers who expressed great interest in the subject, I found it hard not to wonder: 'paedophile'?

We had trouble, too, with the cover. If a girl is showing verve, assertiveness, mischief - her spice rather than her sugar - then the picture can often be seen as a sexual come-on whatever her innocence. The words aren't easy either. Our theme is that girls are invisible and that this must change. But try to use any word which demands that we 'look' at girls, and there's innuendo. Worse innuendo, it seems, for girls than for women. When I did an NI on women back in 1977, I called my keynote 'Waking up to Women' and no-one had a problem. Is it just that we're much more politically correct nowadays? Why, I keep asking myself, are 'girls' so difficult?

So all the time I've been putting the magazine together I've been puzzling over this problem. I suppose 'girls', with its easy elision into gels' or 'girlies', has a way to go before it can sound like something to do with gender rather than sex or giggles. Maybe the vulnerability of girls makes them - paradoxically - easy to ridicule. A kind of shame about this makes us extra sensitive about how we portray them. I think that's the answer. I'll probably change my mind next week. In the meantime it's been a pleasure - and a challenge - to produce this issue of the NI, and it's time it went to bed.

Letters
Letters from Lahore
Updates
Reviews: plus Roland Barthes classic
Curiosities
Endpiece: by Paul Davies
Country profile: Indonesia

FRONT COVER PHOTOGRAPH: ON THE AFGHAN BORDER. A YOUNG GIRL IN A REFUGEE CAMP, PAKISTAN.
ONLINE MAG MAINTAINED BY SIMON LOFFLER