Tuesday, October 09, 2012

How dare the Taliban shoot a 14 year old girl who just wants to go to school! #dayofthegirl

I look at the two 13 year old girls in my lounge just now. They've had a great day at school, learning about all sorts of things. One of them had a profound exchange with her science teacher about gender and sex being two different things.

Every day they pile into the car with a new story to tell, a discussion had, a maths problem solved, some new controversy in science. They are having a great time.

I think of my niece, just started studying Psychology at Edinburgh University with all the opportunities that await her.

It breaks my heart to think that education is not freely available to every child - and most especially not to every girl. And when I think that a girl just a few months older than the teenagers in my lounge, who should be having the same sorts of conversations, has been shot in North West Pakistan by the Taliban, it makes me furious.

A mere 14, Malala Yousafzai already has a proud history of activism and campaigning dating back 3 years, when she wrote a blog for the BBC about life under Taliban control.

Sophie Bridger has written about Malala and the wider issue of educating girls over on Wild Women, the Scottish Women Liberal Democrats' blog. Please go and read what she has to say and sign up to the Plan petition that she mentions for the International Day of the Girl on Thursday. On their website you can download a banner for Facebook. It would be great to see lots of them proudly displayed between now and Thursday.

1 comment:

John Minard said...

what a devastating and bewildering event - it seems that women are but a close second to the USA in being seen as the enemy of fundamentalism.

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