Frieder Otto Wolf, President of the Humanist Association of Germany, has welcomed the first International Day of the Girl Child and called for the new day of action to be celebrated with dignity in our own thoughts and actions.
“It gives me great pleasure to welcome this day of action on behalf of humanists on its first occasion. I very much hope that this occasion to commemorate the outstanding importance of children and adolescent women will become a regularly observed part of our culture,” said Wolf. International Day of the Girl Child is celebrated on October 11. It is the result of an initiative by the children’s aid organization Plan Deutschland and a decision by the United Nations last December to establish an “International Day of the Girl Child”. The day will be celebrated for the first time on Thursday and is intended, among other things, to draw attention to the challenges and problems faced by girls all over the planet. “Humanists recognize the important role girls play in society and their communities. They support the awareness that girls are the bearers of indispensable rights and potentials from birth, which must not be relativized or negated by invoking religiously based rules or other forms of human unreasonableness,” Wolf continued. He also called for the day to be used not only for reflection, but also to raise awareness of the many abuses that still exist in our country and around the world today and which particularly affect girls. “Poverty, marginalization, sexual violence and cultural discrimination are unfortunately still among the unconquered evils that girls are confronted with from an early age and almost everywhere, even in Germany. The direct causes include the persistence of patriarchal structures in many social milieus and, at the same time, an intensification of economic competition without regard to specific burdens and concerns,” says Wolf. The opportunity for a self-determined life free from destructive paternalism, which is one of the central demands of modern, practical humanism, can still only be realized by a small proportion of all young women worldwide and realized in their own lives, he emphasized. “The foundations for this are often laid in childhood and we must therefore make it our cause. Girls will not only be half of our society, they are already half of our future.”
