ARTICLE 1: Every girl has the right to live their own life and not let the hardships push them into believing that their life does not matter.
ARTICLE 2: Every girl has the right to define their experiences and problems in their own words and terms.
ARTICLE 2: Every girl has the right for their life to be understood in the context of what they have been through.
ARTICLE 3: Every girl has the right to include others who are important to them in the process of reclaiming their life from the effects of intense hardships.
ARTICLE 4: Every girl has the right to be free from having problems caused by hardships located inside them, internally, as if there is some deficit in them. The person is not the problem, the problem is the problem.
ARTICLE 5: Every girl has the right for their responses to hardship to be acknowledged. No one is a passive recipient of oppression. People always respond. People always protest injustice.
ARTICLE 6: Every girl has the right to have their skills and knowledges of survival and resistance respected, honoured and acknowledged.
ARTICLE 7: Every girl has the right to know and experience that what they has learnt through hardship can make a contribution to others in similar situations.
Them/their has been used instead of she/her as suggested by the young non-binary people we collaborated with. They agreed that it was important to keep it as “young women” as it is about Just Girls – a metaphor for intersectional feminism and “standing up to patriarchy.”
*Adapted from The Narrative Therapy Charter of Story-telling Rights by David Denborough, which was adapted from the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.
Photo © Mimi Chakrabarti