Become a member
For the UN Day of the Girl Child, we had the privilege of interviewing Hon. Justice Teresa Doherty from Northern Ireland. Throughout her distinguished career, she has dealt with both war crimes and harmful cultural traditions that profoundly affect girls. She took some time to share her reflections with us.
Justice Doherty heard evidence of atrocities committed during two civil wars—in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, and Sierra Leone. She observed that, in the public eye, the term child soldiers usually evokes the image of young boys. While boys indeed suffer greatly, the fact that many girls are also abducted and forced into combat roles is often overlooked. Crucially, in many cases, girls are also exploited as sex slaves by rebel groups. In Sierra Leone, she heard testimony that girls were handed over to “SBUs” — small boys’ units — to be used for sex by the boy soldiers.
Even though rape has been recognized as a “weapon of war” and declared both a war crime and a crime against humanity by international and national institutions, Justice Doherty was deeply shocked to hear girl witnesses say that men had “rights” to have sex with them if they were captured.
For her, the use of the word right is particularly powerful and troubling. Some young witnesses appeared to almost accept such horrific mistreatment as inevitable. In many cases, girls who had been abducted and raped were not welcomed back into their families after the conflict ended, due to a belief that they were “tainted with rebel blood.” As a result, they endured deeper stigmatization and suffering than many of the boys, who at least were provided some form of rehabilitation.
These consequences are often intertwined with harmful cultural practices. Justice Doherty notes that traditions such as arranged marriages and female genital mutilation (FGM) continue to undermine the rights of girls. She recalls hearing girls who had undergone initiation rites—including FGM—express feelings of superiority over classmates from ethnic groups that did not practice it. She also once refused to issue a court order that would have transferred a girl child as compensation in a dispute.
To combat such practices, Justice Doherty contributed to drafting legislation that bans FGM. Yet, in her view, the most important step is to reach the older women—matriarchs and grandmothers—who are often the strongest defenders of these traditions. To spark meaningful change, she emphasizes, we must educate and engage these women so that they abandon harmful practices and instead safeguard both the health and the rights of the girl child.