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Insight: Girls in danger during COVID-19 pandemic
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ecent reports by Save the Children show that girls are impacted differently by the COVID-19 pandemic. On the heels of the International Day of the Girl, which fell on Oct. 11, we are reminded that COVID-19 mitigation measures and regulations must take into account girls’ situation and voices.
Save the Children estimates that the number of girls at risk of child marriage globally could increase by almost 2.5 million over the next five years based on analysis of the economic impact of the pandemic. The risk of adolescent pregnancy is estimated to increase to more than 1 million girls in one year.
These projections are laid out in the Global Girlhood Report 2020, written in consultation with girl champions in several countries including Zahra from Indonesia. The report primarily argued that COVID-19 would halt the 25-year progress on gender equality, which the world has been working toward since the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action was agreed in 1995.
Experience from the Ebola outbreak shows that sexual violence, child marriage and adolescent pregnancy are the most prominent risks for girls during a public health crisis. Girls also will be less likely to return to school once they are taken out. In Ebola-hit villages in Sierra Leone, the proportion of girls aged 12-17 years who did not attend school and were forced to work rose 238 percent and the dropout rate linked to adolescent pregnancy climbed 65 percent.
Our global research “Protect a Generation: The impact of COVID-19 on children's lives” shows the findings that match those predictions. As the largest of its kind, the study employed online survey data collection that gathered responses from more than 25,000 children and adults around the world.
In Indonesia, we gathered 2,232 children aged 11-17 years old (53 percent girls and 47 percent boys) and 4,568 parents/caregivers (60 percent women and 40 percent men) from 30 provinces as respondents.
The data mentioned below are an analysis of responses from 854 children and 1,887 parents of Save the Children’s program participants and 1,182 children and 1,925 parents from Save the Children target area.
In Indonesia, 86 percent of parent respondents felt access to health services as well as daily needs, food and medicine was becoming more difficult. As much as 74 percent of parents had lost their jobs since the pandemic hit, and 35 percent had lost more than half of their income. Only 9 percent of respondents did not feel any difficulty in paying/buying basic needs.
Difficulty in buying food and medicine was felt by 52 percent of respondents and 18 percent of parent respondents experienced difficulty paying for health services. The most reported hardship was paying for utility bills, which was experienced by 53 percent of parent respondents.
As a comparison, 89 percent of parents globally reported that accessing health services, daily needs, food and medicine was more difficult; 77 percent had lost income; almost all (96 percent) reported struggling to pay for food, health care, utilities and other basic needs.
What is worrying about the economic impacts of COVID-19 is that families will employ negative coping mechanisms in response to financial distress, e.g. marry the girls, stop children from returning to school or force them to do labor. Economic constraint is one of the push factors in child marriage mentioned in the National Strategy to Prevent Child Marriage (Stranas PPA).
Even without factoring in child marriage and adolescent pregnancy, girls’ right to education is already at risk during this pandemic. In our study, 52 percent of Indonesian girl respondents reported an increased burden of domestic chores and 34 percent reported doing more unpaid care work, while only 42 percent of boys reported more domestic chores and 27 percent reported more unpaid care work.
More girls reported difficulty studying due to domestic chores (21 percent) than boys (16 percent). Girls are more likely not to return to school after the pandemic (reported by 0.5 percent of respondents) than boys (0.3 percent).
This is a trend globally, as 63 percent of girl respondents are doing more household chores and 52 percent are doing more unpaid care work than before.
Our research was not specifically about violence but we found child respondents to be at risk of witnessing violence. Of the child respondents in Indonesia, 3 percent reported witnessing violence at home. Girls are also more likely to engage in paid labor.
As solutions and to accelerate the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals and implementation of the Stranas PPA, we recommend the government as duty bearer of children’s rights to do the following:
- Support girls to participate in all public decision-making safely and meaningfully on COVID-19 mitigation and recovery
- Maintain and adapt social service providers, shelters, adolescent girl-friendly safe spaces, informal and formal protection from violence systems including by enacting the anti-sexual violence bill draft
- Ensure that gender-responsive and child-sensitive social assistance is received by the most marginalized groups
- Commit to end child marriage and support already married girls to realize their rights
- Commit to gender-responsive, inclusive and child-sensitive budgeting or other best practices for fair financing (including to support universal child benefits)
- Improve disaggregated (by sex, age and disability) data collection and analysis for evidence-based decision making.
Indonesia has been acknowledged by the international community for its significant progress in the fulfilment of children’s rights. We must not let the COVID-19 pandemic stop that progress.
