Today, September 30, marks National Girl Child Day. Bangladesh has made commendable strides in female education, health, and social awareness over the past decades. Girls’ school enrolment and adolescent health services have expanded. Yet genuine sustainable child development demands that we confront a structural vacuum in our legal and policy framework: the treatment of all individuals under eighteen as a single, undifferentiated category of “child.”
Sustainable development requires protection tailored to each child’s age and psychology. A two-year-old infant and a sixteen-year-old adolescent have vastly different needs. Unless national policies are restructured to recognise scientific sub-stages—infancy, middle childhood, and adolescence—holistic development will remain elusive. For the girl child, vulnerabilities such as child marriage, sexual harassment, adolescent pregnancy and digital harassment cannot be addressed under a single umbrella.
The state must adopt distinct strategies for each cohort. For children aged zero to five, adequate nutrition and early stimulation must be ensured through community-based early childhood care. For those aged six to eleven, social safety nets are essential to curb school dropouts and hazardous child labour. During adolescence (twelve to seventeen), making school counselling services mandatory and establishing local recreational clubs is imperative to protect young people from exploitation and harmful influences.
This holistic strategy applies to both genders, but boys and girls do not grow within a singular social mould. Their physiological, psychological, and environmental development dynamics are distinct. Sustained state focus has improved girls’ protection and social standing, though full protection remains distant. Conversely, the lack of parallel frameworks has placed boy children at serious risk—vulnerable to dropping out of school and falling prey to social degradation.
The primary prerequisite for structural gender equality is ensuring the psychological transformation and progressive values of boy children alongside consolidating girls’ advancements. In a patriarchal structure, achieving female protection targets is impossible without raising boy children to be gender-sensitive and responsible citizens.
On this National Girl Child Day, let us commit to a holistic approach that leaves no child behind—not by pitting one gender against the other, but by recognising that sustainable development for girls requires equally sustainable development for boys.
By Salam Abu
Editor
