The pandemic is proving to be harmful to women around the world and Angelina Jolie is fighting to change that.
On Friday, the actress and Special Envoy of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees published an essay in Time magazine calling on global leaders to take action.
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“The UN Secretary General’s latest report on COVID-19 contains a chilling statement: ‘gains on gender equality risk being reversed by decades’ by the pandemic,” Jolie writes. “The numbers paint a stark picture of a possible 2 million additional cases of female genital mutilation globally by 2030, 13 million additional child marriages, an additional 15 million women and girls subjected to gender-based violence for every 3 months of lockdown, and a further 47 million women forced into extreme poverty.”
She adds, “The prospect of ‘decades’ of progress in women’s rights being undone by the pandemic is intolerable and ought to be unthinkable.”
Jolie goes on to call out the United States for letting their Violence Against Women Act lapse last year.
“This should not be a partisan issue. Yet it has emerged as a dividing line in next month’s Presidential election. The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was allowed to lapse in February 2019 and has yet to be reauthorized,” she says. “Only Joe Biden has committed to the authorization of VAWA in his first 100 days in office and to America leading in the fight against gender-based violence globally.”
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She continues, “This should not be a partisan issue. Yet it has emerged as a dividing line in next month’s Presidential election. The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was allowed to lapse in February 2019 and has yet to be reauthorized. Only Joe Biden has committed to the authorization of VAWA in his first 100 days in office and to America leading in the fight against gender-based violence globally.”
The actress concludes, “Not to use our influence to defend and promote women’s rights at a time when they are threatened would betray the fundamental principles of our democracy. It would also send a message to young girls everywhere — already conscious of growing up in an unequal, unjust world — that even though we could see their horizons narrowing during this pandemic, we didn’t care enough to try to stop it.”
