Kathy Lette Backs Girls without Voices Campaign

07 December 2009

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Kathy Lette shot to fame in the late seventies when she penned the novel Puberty Blues since then she has had a string of novels that have empowered women.

And she continues that work with the Girls Without Voices which highlights the inequality of women in the developing world. I caught up with her to talk about the aims of the campaign as well as her long and successful writing career.

- You are backing the Girls Without Voices campaign so can you tell me a little bit about it?

Basically what the new research shows, and what we expected, girls in the developing world are fed last and least they are completely second class citizens, I think that they are runners up in the human race. They are pulled out school really young, it’s funny I left school really young; just before my sixteenth birthday and I always joke about school and how the only examination that I passed is my cervical smear test but at least I had a choice.

In the developing world girls are pulled out of school in primary school and that means a life of domestic servitude they are forced into marriage at twelve and have babies at that age so what you realise is that in most countries girls are absolutely second class citizens.

But if you can educate a girl of course she can earn more money for the family, get the family up out of poverty, and also she will learn about contraception, and I always say that the best way to break the poverty cycle is to break the menstrual cycle because they are held hostage by their hormones and copulation equals population.

So if you educate girls the very first thing that they do is learn about contraception, they don’t want to have so many babies, so it just makes so much sense. At the moment we are wasting half of the world’s potential by keeping girls ignorant and barefoot and pregnant in the question.

- Well that leads me into my next question how fair is it to say that education is key to stop pregnancy and the spread of HIV/Aids?

Totally important it’s so much cheaper to educate people, young girls, than to deal with the repercussions of ignorance, which are unwanted pregnancy and the spread of HIV, it’s so much cheaper to do it now because it gives girls a choice, and feminism is all about choice.

I went to Brazil for Plan and went out to the Slums not far from the Amazon and I was so appalled by the things that I saw there; number one the child prostitution, because of the poverty there the girls are put to work as prostitutes as young as eight and nine, it was just so appalling.

And what Plan do, which is brilliant, they are very hands on, you know a lot of charities you give money to and you wonder where the money is going, but Plan is very very community based so they go into the communities and see what their needs were.

Where I was in Brazil the girls, there was a school but it was ten miles away and they had to walk to it every day and it was so dangerous as they often got raped on the way so they would stop going, so Plan built a community school near the village so they could get to school.

Here I am being very blasé about leaving school so young these kids are so desperate to go to school they do it in half shifts, half of them go from 7.30 am until 12 noon and the other half go from 12.10 to 5.00. So they build schools they give them a hot meal every day and teach them about planting vegetables and how to nourish themselves as well as teaching them about contraception.    

- So how readily available is education in the developing world and what needs to be done to change this?

They just need a cheap classroom and a teacher and the benefits that you get from that, first of all the world is so overpopulated so the benefits to the world of not having so many people which effects global warming and so on. But also disease if you get people with aids then you lose a workforce, it’s a burden on the economy to keep them in hospital so it’s so short sighted not to address things at this end of the scale.
 
-  A survey done in the UK showed that many women believe that education is key to gender equality when climbing the social ladder so how far would you agree with this?

Oh I totally agree with that. Women in the west we shouldn’t get to excited because it’s still a man’s world we don’t have equal pay, we are only getting 75p in £1, we are still getting concussion from hitting our head on the glass ceiling and we are supposed to Windex it while we are up there.

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