Concerns About the United States Global Strategy to Empower Adolescent Girls

By | November 7, 2024

Introduction

The State Department has updated its 2016 Global Strategy to Empower Adolescent Girls.[1] While the strategy is ostensibly designed to improve the lives of girls, it contains many controversial policies that will harm them.

1. The strategy promotes abortion and bypasses U.S. federal restrictions on abortion funding.

The strategy includes references to sexual reproductive health and rights (SRHR), a term that is widely understood to include unfettered access to abortion and gender ideology as human rights.[2]  It prioritizes ensuring adolescent girls’ “access [to] sexual and reproductive health information and services.”[3] It refers to 160 million adolescent girls with an “unmet need” for family planning, which is a misleading term often falsely used to imply a lack of access.[4] The policy’s goals also include radicalizing girls and boys to promote SRHR and other progressive social engineering objectives.[5] The fact that it is meant to be “deployed at the onset of each humanitarian response effort” could be used to bypass a future reinstatement of Mexico City Policy/Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance policy if it retains the previous exception associated with funding for humanitarian interventions.[6]

2. The strategy promotes comprehensive sexuality education and undermines parental rights.

The strategy includes providing girls with comprehensive sexuality education comprehensive sexuality education as an essential “need” alongside nutrition and literacy.[7] CSE is highly controversial in the international as well as domestic context, and guidelines for CSE include such elements as “porn literacy,” masturbation, sexual orientation, and gender identity.  Proponents of CSE advocate for it to be mandatory, undermining parental rights.[8]

3. The strategy uses the term gender “based violence” to erase women and girls and promotes censorship of opponents of the trans agenda.

The strategy uses the term gender-based violence (GBV) rather than referring specifically to violence against women and girls. This terminology is subjective and obscures the focus on girls. It also broadens the scope of the policy to include gender ideology, including boys who identify as girls.[9] GBV language has also been used as a way to incorporate abortion into international policy.[10] The strategy moreover also commits the U.S. government to address “technology-facilitated gender-based violence.” The term is being used to censor any views opposed to unfettered access to abortion and transgender hormone therapies and surgeries for minors,[11] and undermining of parental rights.[12]

4. The strategy promotes gender ideology and LGBTQI+ issues, including hormone therapy and mutilating surgeries for boys and girls.

The strategy conflates a wide variety of disparate issues and concepts, specifically referring to “girls who identified themselves as LGBTQI+” in its section on combatting technology-facilitated gender-based violence. Issues involving sexual orientation and gender identity are controversial both domestically and abroad and function as a way to divert the focus of this strategy away from its intended beneficiaries: adolescent girls. Moreover, the policy’s commitment to SRHR (see above) opens the possibility that part of the U.S. adolescent girls’ strategy will be to support access for girls to transgender-affirming care, including hormone therapy and surgeries.

5. Lacks positive mentions of parents and family

The policy defines adolescents as children as young as ten. Most of the adolescents the strategy seeks to help will be living within their family household. Any program to assist children cannot be done independently from their families. However, the majority of references to the “family” or “parents” in the document are in terms of “family planning” and the negative roles of parents.[13] Adolescent girls cannot be protected by pitting their interests against those of their families or undermining parental authority.

Conclusion

The United States Global Strategy to Empower Adolescent Girls 2024 represents an ambitious approach to addressing the challenges faced by adolescent girls worldwide. However, the strategy’s focus on reproductive health and rights, gender ideology, and comprehensive sexuality education undermine the goal of improving girls’ lives.

 

[1]  Department of State, “United States Global Strategy to Empower Adolescent Girls“, 2024.

[2] C-Fam, “Why Not SRHR?,” February 3, 2021, and C-Fam, “Girl Up! Or, How “Investing” in Adolescent Girls is Code for Abortion Rights,” February 7, 2021

[3] Department of State, “United States Global Strategy to Empower Adolescent Girls 2024,” pg. 13.

[4] C-Fam, “Is There an ‘Unmet Need’ for Family Planning?,” 30 January, 2017.

[5] Interagency Gender Working Group Male Engagement Task Force, “Positive Youth Development in Health Programming: How Does Engaging Boys and Young Men Fit In? A Technical Marketplace,” September 13, 2022.

[6] American Public Health Association, “Preventing and Reducing the Harm of the Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance Policy in Global Public Health,” November 5, 2019.

[7] Department of State, “United States Global Strategy to Empower Adolescent Girls 2024,” pg. 24.

[8] C-Fam, “Why Comprehensive Sexuality Education is Not the Answer,” January 30, 2023. pg. 2, 3, 4

[9] C-Fam, “The Gender Agenda: How the LGBT Movement is Hijacking Women’s Rights,” August 31, 2020. pg. 3.

[10] C-Fam, “The Link between Gender-Based Violence Response and Abortion,” March 15, 2020. pg. 3.

[11] C-Fam, “Problems with USAID’s 2024 Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance Policy,” September 30, 2024. pg. 3.

[12] “Some forms of technology-facilitated gender-based violence are criminal; others are not but are nonetheless harmful,” according to the State Department initiative Global Partnership for Action on Gender-Based Online Harassment and Abuse. (C-Fam, “Biden Backs Global Censorship Regime,” June 1, 2023).

[13] “Parents” deciding girls need less education than boys, marrying child wives off to older men (2 occurrences), parenting forcing girls to forego an education (3 occurrences), or GBV interventions being more effective if they are involved (3 occurrences). Families calculating how to allocate scarce resources and preferring to invest in boys, reinforcing harmful norms that lead to GBV, or on the social and economic benefits that girls give their families once empowered.

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